Publications

Providing Gender to Embodied Conversational Agents [PDF]

Abstract_ Communication, along with other factors, varies with gender. Significant work as been done around embodied conversational agents (ECAs) verbal and non-verbal behaviour but gender issue has often been ignored. Yet, together with personality, culture and other factors, gender is a feature that impacts the perception and thus the believability of the characters. The main goal of this work is to understand how gender can be provided to ECAs, and provide a very simple model that allows for existing tools to overcome such limitation. The proposed system was developed around SAIBA Framework using SmartBody as the behavior realizer and tries to address this problem by adding a set of involuntary gender specific movements to the agents behaviour in an automatic manner. This is achieved by revising and complementing the work done by the existing non-verbal behaviour generators. Focusing mainly on nonverbal behaviour, our agents with gender were tested to see if users were able to perceive the gender bias of the behaviours being performed. Results have shown that gender is correctly perceived, and also has effects when paired with an accurate gender appearance.
Year_ 2011
Authors_ Marco Vala, Gabriel Blanco, Ana Paiva
Volume_ 6895
Pages_ 148-154
Series_ Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher_ Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
Address_ Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Month_ September

Bibtex_

@inproceedings { vala11,
	abstract = {Communication, along with other factors, varies with gender. Significant work as been done around embodied conversational agents (ECAs) verbal and non-verbal behaviour but gender issue has often been ignored. Yet, together with personality, culture and other factors, gender is a feature that impacts the perception and thus the believability of the characters. The main goal of this work is to understand how gender can be provided to ECAs, and provide a very simple model that allows for existing tools to overcome such limitation. The proposed system was developed around SAIBA Framework using SmartBody as the behavior realizer and tries to address this problem by adding a set of involuntary gender specific movements to the agents behaviour in an automatic manner. This is achieved by revising and complementing the work done by the existing non-verbal behaviour generators. Focusing mainly on nonverbal behaviour, our agents with gender were tested to see if users were able to perceive the gender bias of the behaviours being performed. Results have shown that gender is correctly perceived, and also has effects when paired with an accurate gender appearance.
},
	address = {Eindhoven, The Netherlands},
	bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de},
	booktitle = {IVA},
	crossref = {DBLP:conf/iva/2011},
	ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_16},
	month = {September},
	pages = {148-154},
	publisher = {Springer Berlin / Heidelberg},
	series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
	title = {Providing Gender to Embodied Conversational Agents},
	volume = {6895},
	year = {2011},
	author = {Marco Vala and Gabriel Blanco and Ana Paiva}
}

@proceedings { DBLP:conf/iva/2011,
	bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de},
	booktitle = {IVA},
	editor = {Hannes H{\"o}gni Vilhj{\'a}lmsson and
               Stefan Kopp and
               Stacy Marsella and
               Kristinn R. Th{\'o}risson},
	ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8},
	isbn = {978-3-642-23973-1},
	publisher = {Springer},
	series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
	title = {Intelligent Virtual Agents - 11th International Conference,
               IVA 2011, Reykjavik, Iceland, September 15-17, 2011. Proceedings},
	volume = {6895},
	year = {2011},
	author = {}
}