Facial Feedback Signals for ECAs

Elisabetta Bevacqua (1) , Dirk Heylen (2) , Catherine Pelachaud (1, 3) , Marion Tellier (4)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
2 FMT group - Formal Methods and Tools
3 TSI - Département Traitement du Signal et des Images
4 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

One of the most desirable characteristics of an intelligent interactive system is its capability of interacting with users in a natural way. An example of such a system is the embodied conversational agent (ECA) that has a humanoid aspect and the capability of communicating with users through multiple modalities such as voice, gesture, facial expressions, that are typical of human-human communication. It is important to make an ECA able to fit well in each role in a conversation: the agent should behave in a realistic and human-like way both while speaking and listening. So far most of the work on ECAs have focused on the importance of the ECA's behaviour in the role of the speaker, implementing models for the generation of verbal and non-verbal signals; but currently we are mainly interested in modelling the listening behaviour. In this paper we will describe our work in progress on this matter.

Mots clés: Conversational agent; facial feedback signals; backchannel; non verbal communication; human-computer communication

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Elisabetta Bevacqua, Dirk Heylen, Catherine Pelachaud, Marion Tellier. Facial Feedback Signals for ECAs. AISB, Apr 2007, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. pp.328-334. ⟨hal-00433312⟩