Embodied conversational characters: Representation formats for multimodal communicative behaviours

Abstract

This contribution deals with the requirements on representation languages employed in planning and displaying communicative multimodal behaviour of embodied conversational agents (ECAs). We focus on the role of behaviour representation frameworks as part of the processing chain from intent planning to the planning and generation of multimodal communicative behaviours. On the one hand, the field is fragmented, with almost everybody working on ECAs developing their own tailor-made representations, which is amongst others reflected in the extensive references list. On the other hand, there are general aspects that need to be modelled in order to generate multimodal behaviour. Throughout the chapter, we take different perspectives on existing representation languages and outline the fundamental of a common framework.