Generating Embodied Descriptions Tailored to User Preferences

We describe two user studies designed to measure the impact of using the characteristic displays of a speaker expressing different user-preference evaluations to select the head and eye behaviour of an animated talking head. In the first study, human judges were reliably able to identify positive and negative evaluations based only on the motions of the talking head. In the second study, subjects generally preferred positive displays to accompany positive sentences and negative displays to accompany negative ones, and showed a particular dislike for negative facial displays accompanying positive sentences.