Generating culture-specific gestures for virtual agent dialogs

Abstract

Integrating culture into the behavioral model of virtual agents has come into focus lately. When investigating verbal aspects of behavior, nonverbal behaviors are desirably added automatically, driven by the speech-act. In this paper, we present a corpus driven approach of generating gestures in a culture-specific way that accompany agent dialogs. The frequency of gestures and gesture-types, the correlation of gesture-types and speech-acts as well as the expressivity of gestures have been analyzed in the two cultures of Germany and Japan and integrated into a demonstrator. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.