believable agents Papers

Empathy is seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This notion is often considered as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating social agents, that are believable and able to engage users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. Indeed, for the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user's... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on models that are rather marginal in current psychological research, or models that are created ad hoc with little theoretical and... Read more

This paper describes the design, implementation, and use of an agent architecture that has been deployed in Alelo, Inc.’s language and culture training systems, which offer practical training for foreign language skills and intercultural competence. These agents support real-time conversation in the language of interest (Dari, Pashto, Arabic, French, and others), using automatic speech recognition and immersive simulation technologies. In earlier work, we developed a number of agent-based language and culture trainers, based on the... Read more

This final evaluation report describes evaluation studies that have been carried out on various aspects of embodied agents. Read more

This workshop call demonstrates that our field is eager to move beyond first-generation generalist projects, toward a more mature practice. To do so, we seek to set up a common set of expectations and criteria for how to judge our work. In this paper, we propose some subclasses of embodied conversational character research and design, with criteria for describing and evaluating research and design advances in each. We suggest that researchers in this field could benefit from carefully... Read more

We are studying how to create believable agents that perform actions and use natural language in interactive, animated, real-time worlds. Believable agents are autonomous agents that have specific, rich personalities like characters in movies and animation. We have extended Hap, the behavior-based architecture used by the Oz group to construct non-linguistic believable agents, to support natural language text generation. These extensions allow us to tightly integrate text generationwith other aspects of the agent, including action, perception,... Read more

Artificial intelligence researchers attempting to create engaging apparently living creatures may find important insight in the work of artists who have explored the idea of believable character. In particular appropriately timed and clearly expressed emotion is a central requirement for believable characters. We discuss these ideas and suggest how they may apply to believable interactive characters which we call "believable agents". Read more