A good gesture: exploring nonverbal communication for robust SLDSs

Actas de las IV Jornadas de Tecnología del Habla (JTH 2006)In this paper we propose a research framework to explore the possibilities that state-of-the-art embodied conversational agents (ECAs) technology can offer to overcome typical robustness problems in spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs), such as error detection and recovery, changes of turn and clarification requests, that occur in many human-machine dialogue situations in real applications. Our goal is to study the effects of nonverbal communication throughout the dialogue, and find out to what extent ECAs can help overcome user frustration in critical situations. In particular, we have created a gestural repertoire that we will test and continue to refine and expand, to fit as closely as possible the users’ expectations and intuitions, and to favour a more efficient and pleasant dialogue flow for the users. We also describe the test environment we have designed, simulating a realistic mobile application, as well as the evaluation methodology for the assessment, in forthcoming tests, of the potential benefits of adding nonverbal communication in complex dialogue situations.This work has been possible thanks to the support grant received from project TIC2003-09068-C02-02 of the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D