Natural Language Communication With Virtual Actor

The development of realistic virtual actors in many applications, from user interface to computer entertainment, creates expectations on the intelligence of these actors including their ability to understand natural language. Based on our research in that area over the past years, we highlight specific technical aspects in the development of language-enabled actors. The embodied nature of virtual agents lead to specific syntactic constructs that are not unlike sublanguages: these can be used to specify the parsing component of a natural language interface. However, the most specific aspects of interacting with virtual actors consist in mapping the semantic content of users’ input to the mechanisms that support agents’ behaviours. We suggest that a generalisation of speech acts can provide principles for this integration. Both aspects are illustrated by results obtained during the development of research prototypes..