Abstract
The development of realistic virtual actors in many applications, from user interface to computer entertainment, creates expectations on the intelligence of these actors including their ability to understand natural language. Based on our research in that area over the past years, we highlight specific technical aspects in the development of language-enabled actors. The embodied nature of virtual agents lead to specific syntactic constructs that are not unlike sublanguages: these can be used to specify the parsing component of a natural language interface. However, the most specific aspects of interacting with virtual actors consist in mapping the semantic content of users’ input to the mechanisms that support agents’ behaviours. We suggest that a generalisation of speech acts can provide principles for this integration. Both aspects are illustrated by results obtained during the development of research prototypes.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cavazza, M., Palmer, I.J.: Natural Language Control of Interactive 3D Animation and Computer Games. Virtual Reality 3, 1–18 (1999)
Cavazza, M., Charles, F., Mead, S.J.: AI-based Animation for Interactive Storytelling. In: Proceedings of IEEE Computer Animation, Seoul, Korea (2001)
Webber, B., Badler, N., Di Eugenio, B., Geib, C., Levison, L., Moore, M.: Instructions, Intentions and Expectations. Artificial Intelligence Journal 73, 253–269 (1994)
Sager, N.: Sublanguage: Linguistic Phenomenon, Computational Tool. In: Grishman, R., Kittredge, R. (eds.) Analyzing Language in Restricted Domains, Hillsdale, New Jersey. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah (1986)
Ogden, W.C., Bernick, P.: Using Natural Language Interfaces. In: Helander, M. (ed.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. Elsevier Science Publishers, North-Holland (1996)
Zoltan-Ford, E.: How to get people to say and type what computers can understand. The International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 34, 527–547 (1991)
Microsoft. Guidelines for Designing Character Interaction. Microsoft Corporation, Available on-line at http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/imedia/agent/guidelines.asp
Wauchoppe, K., Everett, S., Perzanovski, D., Marsh, E.: Natural Language in Four Spatial Interfaces. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 8–11 (1997)
Joshi, A., Levy, L., Takahashi, M.: Tree Adjunct Grammars. Journal of the Computer and System Sciences 10, 1 (1975)
Cavazza, M.: An Integated TFG Parser with Explicit Tree Typing, Proceedings of the Fourth TAG+ Workshop, Technical Report, IRCS-98-12, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania (1998)
Abeillé, A.: Une grammaire lexicalisée d’arbres adjoints pour le francais: application a l’analyse automatique. These de Doctorat de l’Université Paris 7 (1991) (in French)
De Smedt, K., Kempen, G.: Segment Grammars: a Formalism for Incremental Sentence Generation. In: Paris, C. (ed.) Natural Language Generation and Computational Linguistics, Dordrecht. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1990)
Nau, D.S., Smith, S.J.J., Erol, K.: Control Strategies in HTN Planning: Thoery versus Practice. In: Proceedings of AAAI/IAAI 1998, pp. 1127–1133 (1998)
Cavazza, M., Charles, F., Mead, S.J.: Interacting with Virtual Characters in Interactive Storytelling. In: Proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002, Bologna, Italy (2002) (in press)
Cavazza, M., Charles, F., Mead, S.J.: Sex, Lies and Video Games: an Interactive Storytelling Prototype. In: AAAI Spring Symposium in Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Stanford, USA (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cavazza, M. (2003). Natural Language Communication with Virtual Actors. In: Pazienza, M.T. (eds) Information Extraction in the Web Era. SCIE 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2700. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45092-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45092-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40579-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45092-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive