TY - GEN
T1 - A framework for integrating gesture generation models into interactive conversational agents
AU - Nagy, Rajmund
AU - Kucherenko, Taras
AU - Moell, Birger
AU - Pereira, André
AU - Kjellström, Hedvig
AU - Bernardet, Ulysses
N1 - Copyright © 2021 by International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
PY - 2021/5/3
Y1 - 2021/5/3
N2 - Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) benefit from non-verbal behavior for natural and efficient interaction with users. Gesticulation - hand and arm movements accompanying speech - is an essential part of non-verbal behavior. Gesture generation models have been developed for several decades: starting with rule-based and ending with mainly data-driven methods. To date, recent end to- end gesture generation methods have not been evaluated in a real-time interaction with users. We present a proof-of-concept framework, which is intended to facilitate evaluation of modern gesture generation models in interaction. We demonstrate an extensible open-source framework that contains three components: 1) a 3D interactive agent; 2) a chatbot backend; 3) a gesticulating system. Each component can be replaced, making the proposed framework applicable for investigating the effect of different gesturing models in real-time interactions with different communication modalities, chatbot backends, or different agent appearances. The code and video are available at the project page https://nagyrajmund.github.io/project/gesturebot.
AB - Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) benefit from non-verbal behavior for natural and efficient interaction with users. Gesticulation - hand and arm movements accompanying speech - is an essential part of non-verbal behavior. Gesture generation models have been developed for several decades: starting with rule-based and ending with mainly data-driven methods. To date, recent end to- end gesture generation methods have not been evaluated in a real-time interaction with users. We present a proof-of-concept framework, which is intended to facilitate evaluation of modern gesture generation models in interaction. We demonstrate an extensible open-source framework that contains three components: 1) a 3D interactive agent; 2) a chatbot backend; 3) a gesticulating system. Each component can be replaced, making the proposed framework applicable for investigating the effect of different gesturing models in real-time interactions with different communication modalities, chatbot backends, or different agent appearances. The code and video are available at the project page https://nagyrajmund.github.io/project/gesturebot.
KW - Conversational embodied agents
KW - Non-verbal behavior synthesis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112311041&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2021/
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3463952.3464235
M3 - Conference publication
AN - SCOPUS:85112311041
SN - 978-1-4503-8307-3
T3 - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
SP - 1779
EP - 1781
BT - AAMAS '21: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
PB - IFAAMAS
T2 - 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2021
Y2 - 3 May 2021 through 7 May 2021
ER -