The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs T 2 D : Generating Dialogues Between Virtual Agents Automatically from Text Conference Item

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using synthetic speech and appropriate conversational gestures. In this paper, we present version 1.0 of the T2D system and focus on the novel technique that it uses for mapping rhetorical relations to question–answer pairs, thus transforming (monological) text into a form that supports dialogues between virtual agents.