Situated generation of multimodal deixis in task-oriented dialogue

Kranstedt A, Wachsmuth I. Situated generation of multimodal deixis in task-oriented dialogue. In: Belz A, Evans R, Piwek P, eds. Extended abstracts of posters presented at the Third International Conference on Natural Language Generation. Technical Report No. ITRI-04-01. Brighton UK: University of Brighton; 2004: 20-23.This poster describes ongoing work concerning the generation of multimodal utterances, animated and visualized with the anthropomorphic agent Max. Max is a conversational agent that collaborates in cooperative construction tasks taking place in immersive virtual reality, realized in a three-side CAVE- like installation. Max is able to produce synchronized output involving synthetic speech, facial display, and gesture from descriptions of their surface form [Kopp and Wachsmuth, 2004]. Focusing on deixis here it is shown how the influence of situational characteristics in face-to-face conversation can be accounted for in the automatic generation of such descriptions in multimodal dialogue