Hideaki Takeda's Publication
- T. Takahashi, H. Takeda and Y. Katagiri:
Proposal of a Script Language for Embodied Agents as Personal Conversational
Media in Online Communities, in Proceedings of the AAMAS 2002 Workshop on
Embodied conversational agents - let's specify and evaluate them!
(2002).
(Paper)
In this paper, we propose a script language for embodied
conversational agents that can function as personal conversational media in
asynchronous community systems. Despite the fact that the community
interaction is a social event, current online community systems are designed
to focus mainly on information exchange through texts, and provide very
little support for establishing and maintaining social relationships among
participants. In order to enhance and exploit human prowess in social
interaction, we have developed an asynchronous community system that employs
embodied conversational agents (ECAs) as conversational media. An ECA, an
animated character on a screen, can display various social expressions on
behalf of the user. Therefore, we can construct and represent social
interactive environment by a group of ECAs acting on a screen. This
environment created by ECAs, in turn, induces social and psychological
relationships between each ECA and the users. In this paper, we call such
ECAs Personified Media (PM). We propose a script language for PM, PM Script,
which enables users to specify and describe the behaviors, both expressive
and interactive, of PM together with the handlings of other media contents.
Participants in asynchronous community systems have sufficient time to
compose a script description for their PM. In addition to the features of
ECAs, the social presence of a PM can enhance users' community awareness in
terms of the human social environment. Therefore, conversations using PM
should be smooth, expressive, informative, and social. By accumulating
submitted scripts, PM Script can also serve as materials for further analysis
and processing of actual participant behavior data in community interactions.
Hideaki Takeda (National Institute of Informatics)