Papers about Cultural awareness

With the increase in the development of autonomous agents, there is a bigger demand on their capability of interacting with other agents and users in ways that are natural and inspired by how humans interact. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. Our goal is to create an architecture able to model cultural groups of agents with perceivable distinct behaviour. In particular, this... Read more

This paper presents two attempts in integrating attentiveness into a virtual quiz agent in the situation when multiple game participants present. One of them features an utterance strategy to determine when and whom to talk to among the participants. The other one features a SVM (support vector machine) triggered transition state model of the agent's attitude toward the participants in expressing observable behaviors. Both of them are driven by timings determined on video and audio... Read more

Avatars are frequently used in virtual worlds and online games to convey emotions across cultures. However, our previous study suggested there are cultural differences in recognizing avatar's facial expressions [1]. Yuki et al.'s study using emoticons and photorealistic human face images suggests Americans tend to interpret emotions based on the mouth, while Japanese tend to focus on the eyes [2]. Inspired by Yuki's study, this study uses cartoonish avatar faces to find cultural differences in... Read more

In this article we show how socio-psychological status theories can be formalized and used to control the expressive and communicative behavior of intelligent virtual agents. We describe Exstasis, a model that computes the status and action tendencies for all actors in a situation based on their status characteristics and behavior patterns. As a configurable software component Exstasis can be integrated in existing systems to extend the social capabilities of the virtual characters. Read more

Users expect characters in role-playing games to be proactive and social, but these characters fail to deliver in this respect due to limitations of traditional game AI programming approaches. BDI-based approaches are suited for development of proactive systems, such as NPCs in games. This paper argues that a BDI-based approach is also highly suited for developing social NPCs in a principled way. Read more

When humans interact with one another, socially intelligent conversational behaviors arise from the interaction of a number of different factors: the conversants' personality, cultural knowledge, the ability to observe and reason about social relationships, and the ability to project and detect affective cues. For virtual agents to be socially intelligent, they must have an expressive conversational repertoire. Moreover, scientific progress in this area requires that these expressive capabilities be easily parameterized, to support experimentation, and... Read more

This paper presents some insights into the effect of ‘virtual gender’ on the way people interact with, make sense of, and build relationships with conversational agents. The focus is on the linkage between sex stereotypes and aggression, in the form of verbal abuse towards the machine. Implications for design of embodied conversational agents are discussed. Read more

The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive research. An android provides an experimental apparatus that has the potential to be controlled more precisely than any human actor. However, preliminary results indicate that only very humanlike devices can elicit the broad range of responses that people typically direct toward each other. Conversely, to build androids capable of emulating human behavior, it is necessary to investigate social activity in detail and to... Read more

In this paper, we present some initial thoughts on the occurrence of verbal abuse in human-chatterbot interaction within the framework of social-cognition. This thinking is an important step towards the understanding of virtual relationships and the design of socially adept technology. Read more

Chatterbots are computer programs that simulate intelligent conversation. They are situated between games and toys, as their aim is mostly to be entertaining, but the user doesn't have to follow precise rules when playing with the program. Currently business and educational applications have started to emerge as a further development of the idea of intelligent dialog. For the game industry, they come close to the concept of NPC, or Non-Player Character, and they may become... Read more