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Does Personality Matter? Expressive Generation for Dialogue Interaction

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Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones

Abstract

This paper summarizes our recent work on developing the technical capabilities needed to automatically generate dialogue utterances that express either a personality or the persona of a dramatic character. In previous work, we developed a personality-based generation engine, PERSONAGE, that produces dialogic restaurant recommendations that varied according to the speakers personality. More recently we have been exploring three issues: (1) how to coordinate verbal expression of personality or character with nonverbal expression through facial or body animation parameters; (2) whether we can express character models that we learn from film dialogue with the existing parameters of the PERSONAGE engine; and (3) whether we can show experimentally that expressive generation is useful in a range of tasks. Our long-term goal is to create off-the-shelf tools to support the creation of spoken dialogue agents with their own persona and personality, for a broad range of types of dialogue agents in task-oriented applications or in interactive stories and games.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the organizers of IWSDS 2012 for organizing such a wonderful occasion for discussing work on dialogue systems and for inviting me to give a keynote at the workshop. This paper has benefited from their feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab, Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Marilyn A. Walker, Jennifer Sawyer, Grace Lin & Sam Wing

Authors
  1. Marilyn A. Walker
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  2. Jennifer Sawyer
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  3. Grace Lin
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  4. Sam Wing
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Correspondence to Marilyn A. Walker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Joseph Mariani

  2. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Sophie Rosset

  3. IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Martine Garnier-Rizet

  4. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Laurence Devillers

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Walker, M.A., Sawyer, J., Lin, G., Wing, S. (2014). Does Personality Matter? Expressive Generation for Dialogue Interaction. In: Mariani, J., Rosset, S., Garnier-Rizet, M., Devillers, L. (eds) Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8280-2_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8280-2_26

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