Tablepresenter: a Life-like Agent Explaining Tables

This paper proposes a life-like presentation agent system called TablePresenter. In the TablePresenter, a user edits a table on Microsoft Excel, and also specifies the presentation contents for explaining the table in the form of tree structure, called presentation tree. The system then generates animated presentation by an agent. Presentation trees have intermediate nodes labeled as “contrast” and “compare,” and such types of nodes are associated with appropriate speech text templates with gesture specifications. Traversing the presentation tree then yields speech texts for explaining the table, and the resultant texts animate the agent. We developed a prototype TablePresenter system, and it successfully generated animated presentations for tables.