Imitation Games with an Artificial Agent: From Mimicking to Understanding Shape-Related Iconic Gestures

We describe an anthropomorphic agent that is engaged in an imitation game with the human user. In imitating natural gestures demonstrated by the user, the agent brings together gesture recognition and synthesis on two levels of representation. On the mimicking level, the essential form features of the meaning-bearing gesture phase (stroke) are extracted and reproduced by the agent. Meaning-based imitation requires extracting the semantic content of such gestures and re-expressing it with possibly alternative gestural forms. Based on a compositional semantics for shape-related iconic gestures, we present rst steps towards this higher-level gesture imitation in a restricted domain.