Center for Human Modeling and Simulation
Title
Animating Synthetic Dyadic Conversations With Variations Based on Context and Agent Attributes
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2-2012
Publication Source
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds
Volume
23
Issue
1
Start Page
17
Last Page
32
DOI
10.1002/cav.1421
Abstract
Conversations between two people are ubiquitous in many inhabited contexts. The kinds of conversations that occur depend on several factors, including the time, the location of the participating agents, the spatial relationship between the agents, and the type of conversation in which they are engaged. The statistical distribution of dyadic conversations among a population of agents will therefore depend on these factors. In addition, the conversation types, flow, and duration will depend on agent attributes such as interpersonal relationships, emotional state, personal priorities, and socio-cultural proxemics. We present a framework for distributing conversations among virtual embodied agents in a real-time simulation. To avoid generating actual language dialogues, we express variations in the conversational flow by using behavior trees implementing a set of conversation archetypes. The flow of these behavior trees depends in part on the agents’ attributes and progresses based on parametrically estimated transitional probabilities. With the participating agents’ state, a ‘smart event’ model steers the interchange to different possible outcomes as it executes. Example behavior trees are developed for two conversation archetypes: buyer–seller negotiations and simple asking–answering; the model can be readily extended to others. Because the conversation archetype is known to participating agents, they can animate their gestures appropriate to their conversational state. The resulting animated conversations demonstrate reasonable variety and variability within the environmental context. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Copyright/Permission Statement
This is the peer reviewed version of the article which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cav.1421. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
Keywords
conversation model, agent attributes, smart event, behavior trees, crowd simulation
Recommended Citation
Sun, L., Shoulson, A., Huang, P., Nelson, N., Qin, W., Nenkova, A., & Badler, N. I. (2012). Animating Synthetic Dyadic Conversations With Variations Based on Context and Agent Attributes. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 23 (1), 17-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cav.1421
Date Posted: 29 February 2016
This document has been peer reviewed.