Conversational strategies in children’s talk

Small Talk and Conversational Storytelling in Embodied Conversational Interface Agents

People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongo...

TCUs and TRPs: The Construction of Units in Conversational Talk*

Walk the talk: coordinating gesture with locomotion for conversational characters

Communicative behaviors are a very important aspect of human behavior, and deserve special attention when simulating groups and crowds of virtual pedestrians. Previous approaches have tended to focus on generating believable gestures for individual characters and talker-listener behaviors for static groups. In this paper, we consider the problem of creating rich and varied conversational behavi...

Towards Academically Productive Talk Supported by Conversational Agents

In this paper, we investigate the use of conversational agents to scaffold on-line collaborative learning discussions through an approach called academically productive talk. In contrast to past work, which has involved using agents to elevate the conceptual depth of collaborative discussion by leading students in groups through directed lines of reasoning, this approach lets students follow th...

Interaction Strategies for an Affective Conversational Agent

The development of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) as Companions brings several challenges for both affective and conversational dialogue. These include challenges in generating appropriate affective responses, selecting the overall shape of the dialogue, providing prompt system response times and handling interruptions. We present an implementation of such a Companion showing the developm...