Planning Small Talk Behavior with Cultural Inuences for Multiagent Systems

Birgit Endrass (1) , Matthias Rehm (1) , Elisabeth André (1)

1 Augsburg University

There are several factors that inuence communicative behavior, such as gen- der, personality or culture. As virtual agents interact in a more and more human-like manner, their behavior should be dependent on social factors as well. Culture is a phenomenon that a_ects one's behavior without one realiz- ing it. Behavior is thus sometimes perceived as inappropriate because there is no awareness of the cultural gap. Thus, we think cultural background should also inuence the communication behavior of virtual agents. Behav- ioral di_erences are sometimes easy to recognize by humans but still hard to describe formally, to enable integration into a system that automatically generates culture-speci_c behavior. In our work, we focus on culture-related di_erences in the domain of casual Small Talk. Our model of culture-related di_erences in Small Talk behavior is based on _ndings described in the lit- erature as well as on a video corpus that was recorded in Germany and Japan. In a validation study, we provide initial evidence that our simulation of culture-speci_c Small Talk with virtual agents is perceived di_erently by human observers. We thus implemented a system that automatically gener- ates culture-speci_c Small Talk dialogs for virtual agents.

Mots clés: Virtual Agents; Culture; Small Talk; Behavior Planning; Language Generation

Domaines: Linguistique

Birgit Endrass, Matthias Rehm, Elisabeth André. Planning Small Talk Behavior with Cultural Inuences for Multiagent Systems. Computer Speech and Language, 2010, 25 (2), pp.158. ⟨10.1016/j.csl.2010.04.001⟩. ⟨hal-00692182⟩