Fluid Semantic Back-Channel Feedback in Dialogue: Challenges and Progress

  • Authors:

  • Gudny Ragna Jonsdottir;Jonathan Gratch;Edward Fast;Kristinn R. Thórisson

  • Affiliations:

  • CADIA / Department of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Ofanleiti 2, IS-103 Reykjavik, Iceland;University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, 12374 Fiji Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292,;University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, 12374 Fiji Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292,;CADIA / Department of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Ofanleiti 2, IS-103 Reykjavik, Iceland

  • Venue:
  • IVA '07 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Participation in natural, real-time dialogue calls for behaviors supported by perception-action cycles from around 100 msec and up. Generating certain kinds of such behaviors, namely envelope feedback, has been possible since the early 90s. Real-time backchannel feedback related to the content of a dialogue has been more difficult to achieve. In this paper we describe our progress in allowing virtual humans to give rapid within-utterance content-specific feedback in real-time dialogue. We present results from human-subject studies of content feedback, where results show that content feedback to a particular phrase or word in human-human dialogue comes 560-2500 msec from the phrase's onset, 1 second on average. We also describe a system that produces such feedback with an autonomous agent in limited topic domains, present performance data of this agent in human-agent interactions experiments and discuss technical challenges in light of the observed human-subject data.