People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongo...

Embodied conversational agents are virtual characters that engage users in conversation with appropriate speech, gesture, and facial expression. The high cost of developing embodied conversational agents has led to a recent increase in open source agent platforms. In this paper, we present XNAgent, an open source platform for embodied conversational agents based on the XNA Framework. By leverag...

Conversational fillers (CFs), commonly transcribed as uh, um, or er, typically start with a schwa-like vowel, and signal multiple social, interactive, meta-cognitive, and pragmatic functions. They also co-occur with prosodic boundaries, increase saliency of inter-word disjunctures, and participate thus in coding the prosodic structure. Contrary to these functions, CFs are assumed not to partici...

As spoken language systems become more conversational in nature, new interfaces are emerging with animated characters that are designed to elicit and manage a conversation with the user. In the present study, the spoken language of ten 6-to-10year-old children was compared while interacting with an animated character in the I SEE! interface and again while interacting with a human adult. Analys...

Introducing pronunciation models into decoding has been proven to be benefit to LVCSR. In this paper, a discriminative pronunciation modeling method is presented, within the framework of the Minimum Phone Error (MPE) training for HMM/GMM. In order to bring the pronunciation models into the MPE training, the auxiliary function is rewritten at word level and decomposes into two parts. One is for ...

We detail the design, development and evaluation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) software which encourages rapid conversational interaction. The system uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to automatically generate conversational utterances from a domain knowledge base modelled from content suggested by a small AAC user group. Findings from this work are present...

The phatic function of communication is a vital element of any conversation. This research paper looks into this function with respect to personal blogs maintained by Indian bloggers. This paper is a study into the phenomenon of phatic communication maintained by bloggers through their blogs. Based on a linguistic analysis of the posts of twenty eight Indian bloggers, writing in English, studie...

This paper addresses the problem of designing embodied conversational agents that exhibit appropriate posture shifts during dialogues with human users. Previous research has noted the importance of hand gestures, eye gaze and head nods in conversations between embodied agents and humans. However, this research has neglected the role of other body movements, in particular postural shifts. We pre...

This paper discusses ConvoCons, a novel system of conversational icons intended to encourage affinity between collaborators unobtrusively. Using a reification of Bonnie Nardi’s framework for social connection and affinity, ConvoCons overlay an existing application and display varying media that can encourage collaborating partners to begin developing affinity through informal conversations. Thi...

Research in animals and humans suggests a role of oxytocin in social approach to strangers. We tested this by introducing undergraduate students to opposite-gendered strangers, with each member of the pair having taken either oxytocin or placebo. One hundred and four undergraduate students were paired up and engaged in a face-to-face conversation structured with a series of intimate topics for ...