Abstract
Rapport, the feeling of being “in sync” with your conversational partners, is argued to underlie many desirable social effects. By generating proper verbal and nonverbal behaviors, virtual humans have been seen to create rapport during interactions with human users. In this paper, we introduce our approach to creating rapport following Tickle-Degnen and Rosenberg’s threefactor (positivity, mutual attention and coordination) theory of rapport. By comparing with a previously published virtual agent, the Rapport Agent, we show that our virtual human predicts the timing of backchannel feedback and end-of-turn more precisely, performs more natural behaviors and, thereby creates much stronger feelings of rapport between users and virtual agents.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Drolet, A.L., Morris, M.W.: Rapport in conflict resolution: accounting for how face-to-face contact fosters mutual cooperation in mixed-motive conflicts. Experimental Social Psychology 36, 26–50 (2000)
Burns, M.: Rapport and relationships: the basis of child care. J. Child Care 2, 47–57 (1984)
Tatar, D.: Social and personal consequences of a preoccupied listener. Stanford University, Stanford (1997)
Bernieri, F.J., Rosenthal, R.: Interpersonal coordination: Behavior matching and interactional synchrony. In: Feldman, R.S., Rime, B. (eds.) Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behaviors. Studies in emotion and social interaction, pp. 401–432. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1991)
Tickle-Degnen, L., Rosenthal, R.: The Nature of Rapport and its Nonverbal Correlates. Psychological Inquiry 1(4), 285–293 (1990)
Cassell, J., Gill, A.J., Tepper, P.A.: Coordination in conversation and rapport. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing, pp. 41–50 (2007)
Bailenson, J.N., Yee, N.: Digital Chameleons: Automatic assimilation of nonverbal gestures in immersive virtual environments. Psychological Science 16, 814–819 (2005)
Bickmore, T., Puskar, K., Schlenk, E., Pfeifer, L., Sereika, S.: Maintaining Reality: Relational Agents for Antipsychotic Medication Adherence. J. Interacting with Computers special issue on Mental Health (2010)
Bevacqua, E., Mancini, M., Pelachaud, C.: A listening agent exhibiting variable behaviour. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 262–269. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Kang, S.-H., Gratch, J., Watts, J.: The Effect of Affective Iconic Realism on Anonymous Interactants’ Self-Disclosure. In: Proceedings of Interaction Conference for Human-Computer Interaction (2009)
Gratch, J., Wang, N., Gerten, J., Fast, E., Duffy, R.: Creating rapport with virtual agents. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 125–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
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)
Morency, L.-P., et al.: Contextual Recognition of Head Gestures. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Multimodal Interactions (2005)
Thiebaux, M., Marshall, A., Marsella, S., Kallmann, M.: SmartBody: Behavior Realization for Embodied Conversational Agents. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (2008)
Wang, N., Gratch, J.: Don’t just stare at me. In: Proceedings of 28th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010)
von der Pütten, A., Krämer, N., Gratch, J.: Who’s there? Can a Virtual Agent Really Elicit Social Presence. In: Proceedings of 12th Annual International Workshop on Presence (2009)
Wang, N., Gratch, J.: Rapport and Facial Expression. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (2009)
Jonsdottir, G.R., Thorisson, K.R., Nivel, E.: Learning smooth, human-like turntaking in realtime dialogue. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 162–175. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Huang, L., Morency, L.-P., Gratch, J.: Parasocial Consensus Sampling: Combining Multiple Perspectives to Learn Virtual Human Behavior. In: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2010)
Morency, L.-P., de Kok, I., Gratch, J.: Predicting listener backchannels: A probabilistic multimodal approach. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 176–190. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Lee, J., Marsella, S.: Learning a Model of Speaker Head Nods using Gesture Corpora. In: Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agent and Multiagent System, pp. 189–296 (2009)
ter Maat, M., Truong, K., Heylen, D.: How turn-taking strategies influence users’ impressions of an agent. In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (2010)
Huang, L., Morency, L.-P., Gratch, J.: A Multimodal End-of-Turn Prediction Model: Learning from Parasocial Consensus Sampling. In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2011)
Moon, Y.: Intimate exchanges: Using computers to elicit self-disclosure from consumers. J. Consumer Research 26(4), 323–339 (2000)
Bailenson, J.N., Blascovich, J., Beall, A.C., Loomis, J.M.: Equilibrium revisited: Mutual gaze and personal space in virtual environment. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 10, 583–598 (2001)
Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F.: Conditional Random Field: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data. In: Proceedings of 18th International Conference on Machine Learning (2001)
Kang, S.-H., Gratch, J.: People Like Virtual Counselors that Highly-Disclose About Themselves. The Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine (2011)
Kang, S.-H., Watts, J., Gratch, J.: Associations between interactants’ personality traits and their feelings of rapport in interactions with virtual humans. In: 59th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (2009)
Murphy, K.: Dynamic Bayesian Networks: Representation, Inference and Learning. Ph.D. Thesis, UC Berkeley, Computer Science Division (July 2002)
Huang, L., Morency, L.-P., Gratch, J.: Learning Backchannel Prediction Model from Parasocial Consensus Sampling: A Subjective Evaluation. In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agent (2010)
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
Huang, L., Morency, LP., Gratch, J. (2011). Virtual Rapport 2.0. 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_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_8
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)