Politeness and Alignment in Dialogues with a Virtual Guide

Jong de, Markus and Theune, Mariët and Hofs, Dennis (2008) Politeness and Alignment in Dialogues with a Virtual Guide. In: Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2008, 12-16 May 2008, Estoril, Portugal.

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Abstract:	Language alignment is something that happens automatically in dialogues between human speakers. The ability to align is expected to increase the believability of virtual dialogue agents. In this paper we extend the notion of alignment to affective language use, describing a model for dynamically adapting the linguistic style of a virtual agent to the level of politeness and formality detected in the user’s utterances. The model has been implemented in the Virtual Guide, an embodied conversational agent giving directions in a virtual environment. Evaluation shows that our formality model needs improvement, but that the politeness tactics used by the Guide are mostly interpreted as intended, and that the alignment to the user’s language is noticeable.
Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item
Faculty:	Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)
Research Group:	Human Media Interaction (HMI)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/64764
Official URL:	http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas08/proceedings/pdf/paper/AAMAS08_0548.pdf
Conference URL:	http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas08/
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