Abstract
Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) have the potential to bring to life many kinds of information, and in particular textual contents. In this paper, we present a prototype that helps visualizing the relative importance of sentences extracted from medical texts (clinical guidelines aimed at physicians). We propose to map rhetorical structures automatically recognized in the documents to a set of communicative acts controlling the expression of the ECA. As a consequence, the ECA will dramatize a sentence to reflect its perceived importance and degree of recommendation (advice, requirement, open proposal, etc). This prototype is constituted of three sub-systems: i) a text analysis module, ii) an ECA and iii) a mapping module which converts rhetorical structures produced by the text analysis module into nonverbal behaviors driving the ECA animation. This system could help authors of medical texts to reflect on the potential impact of the writing style they have adopted. The use of ECA re-introduces an affective element which won’t be captured by other methods for analyzing document style.
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Georg, G., Cavazza, M., Pelachaud, C. (2008). Visualizing the Importance of Medical Recommendations with Conversational Agents. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J., Ishizuka, M. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_39
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