Automatic generation of computer a]nimation conveying impressions of news articles

Abstract

This paper proposes a passive viewing interface, called News Reader with Emotional Expressions (wEE), which automatically generates TV program-like animations with synthesized emotional speech and background music from news articles in a user-specified Web news site. A distinctive point of our interface is that it explicitly conveys the impressions of news articles to users by determining appropriate background music and tone of voice for an animated newscaster according to the impressions of each article. Since conventional passive viewing interfaces just read news articles in a monotone, impressions of the articles were not conveyed to users. This caused the bad effect that users did not properly understand news articles in terms of their impressions. We also show that wEE can control (emphasize or soften) impressions of news articles through an on-line experiment with 600 participants. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.