Abstract
Realizing effective listening behavior in virtual humans has become a key area of research, especially as research has sought to realize more complex social scenarios involving multiple participants and bystanders. A human listener’s nonverbal behavior is conditioned by a variety of factors, from current speaker’s behavior to the listener’s role and desire to participate in the conversation and unfolding comprehension of the speaker. Similarly, we seek to create virtual humans able to provide feedback based on their participatory goals and their partial understanding of, and reaction to, the relevance of what the speaker is saying as the speaker speaks. Based on a survey of existing psychological literature as well as recent technological advances in recognition and partial understanding of natural language, we describe a model of how to integrate these factors into a virtual human that behaves consistently with these goals. We then discuss how the model is implemented into a virtual human architecture and present an evaluation of behaviors used in the model.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Argyle, M., Cook, M.: Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1976)
Argyle, M., Lalljee, M., Cook, M.: The effects of visibility on interaction in a dyad. Human Relations 21, 3–17 (1968)
Bavelas, J.B., Coates, L., Johnson, T.: Listeners as co-narrators. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, 941–952 (2000)
Bevacqua, E., Pammi, S., Hyniewska, S.J., Schröder, M., Pelachaud, C.: Multimodal backchannels for embodied conversational agents. In: Safonova, A. (ed.) IVA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6356, pp. 194–200. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Brunner, L.: Smiles can be back channels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(5), 728–734 (1979)
Callan, H., Chance, M., Pitcairn, T.: Attention and advertence in human groups. Social Science Inform. 12, 27–41 (1973)
DeVault, D., Sagae, K., Traum, D.: Incremental interpretation and prediction of utterance meaning for interactive dialogue. Dialogue & Discourse 2(1), 143–170 (2011)
Dittmann, A., Llewellyn, L.: Relationship between vocalizations and head nods as listener responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9, 79–84 (1968)
Ellsworth, P., Friedman, H., Perlick, D., Hoyt, M.: Some effects of gaze on subjects motivated to seek or to avoid social comparison. Journal of Experimental Social Pscyhology 14, 69–87 (1978)
Friedman, H.S., Riggio, R.E.: Effect of individual differences in non-verbal expressiveness on transmission of emotion. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 6(2), 96–104 (1981)
Goffman, E.: Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (1981)
Goodwin, C.: Conversational organization: interaction between speakers and hearers. Academic Press, NY (1981)
Gratch, J., Okhmatovskaia, A., Lamothe, F., Marsella, S.C., Morales, M., van der Werf, R.J., Morency, L.-P.: Virtual rapport. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds.) IVA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4133, pp. 14–27. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Gu, E., Badler, N.I.: Visual attention and eye gaze during multiparty conversations with distractions. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds.) IVA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4133, pp. 193–204. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Hanks, W.F.: Language and Communicative Practices. Westview Press (1996)
Hartholt, A., Gratch, J., Weiss, L., The Gunslinger Team: At the virtual frontier: Introducing gunslinger, a multi-character, mixed-reality, story-driven experience. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 500–501. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Ikeda, K.: Triadic exchange pattern in multiparty communication: A case study of conversational narrative among friends. Language and culture 30(2), 53–65 (2009)
Jan, D., Traum, D.R.: Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations. In: Proc. of the 6th Int. Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 59–66 (2007)
Jonsdottir, G.R., Gratch, J., Fast, E., Thórisson, K.R.: Fluid semantic back-channel feedback in dialogue: Challenges and progress. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 154–160. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Kendon, A.: Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1990)
Kopp, S., Allwood, J., Grammer, K., Ahlsen, E., Stocksmeier, T.: Modeling embodied feedback with virtual humans. In: Wachsmuth, I., Knoblich, G. (eds.) ZiF Research Group International Workshop. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4930, pp. 18–37. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Lee, J., Marsella, S.: Predicting speaker head nods and the effects of affective information. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 12(6), 552–562 (2010)
Lee, J., Marsella, S.C.: Nonverbal behavior generator for embodied conversational agents. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds.) IVA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4133, pp. 243–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Maatman, R.M., Gratch, J., Marsella, S.C.: Natural behavior of a listening agent. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds.) IVA 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3661, pp. 25–36. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Marsella, S., Gratch, J.: EMA: A process model of appraisal dynamics. Cognitive Systems Research 10(1), 70–90 (2009)
Morency, L.P., de Kok, I., Gratch, J.: A probabilistic multimodal approach for predicting listener backchannels. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 70–84. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Vertegaa, R., der Veer, G.C.V., Vons, H.: Effects of gaze on multiparty mediated communication. In: Proc. of Graphics Interface, pp. 95–102 (2000)
Yngve, V.: On getting a word in edgewise. Papers from the 6th Regional Meeting, pp. 567–578 (April 1970)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wang, Z., Lee, J., Marsella, S. (2011). Towards More Comprehensive Listening Behavior: Beyond the Bobble Head. In: Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Kopp, S., Marsella, S., Thórisson, K.R. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6895. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23973-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23974-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)