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Creating a World for Socio-Cultural Agents

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Emotion Modeling

Abstract

Creating agents that are capable of emulating similar socio-cultural dynamics to those found in human interaction remains as one of the hardest challenges of artificial intelligence. This problem becomes particularly important when considering embodied agents that are meant to interact with humans in a believable and empathic manner. In this article, we introduce a conceptual model for socio-cultural agents, and, based on this model, we present a set of requirements for these agents to be capable of showing appropriate socio-cultural behaviour. Our model differentiates between three levels of instantiation: the interaction level, consisting of elements that may change depending on the people involved, the group level, consisting of elements that may change depending on the group affiliation of the people involved, and the society level, consisting of elements that may change depending on the cultural background of those involved. As such, we are able to have culture alter agents’ social relationships rather than directly determining actions, allowing for virtual agents to act more appropriately in any social or cultural context.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by European Community (EC) and was funded by the ECUTE (ICT-5-4.2 257666) and SEMIRA projects. This work was also supported by national funds through FCT Fundao para a Cincia e a Tecnologia, under project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2013. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this publication. It does not represent the opinion of the EC, and the EC is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.

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Degens, N. et al. (2014). Creating a World for Socio-Cultural Agents. In: Bosse, T., Broekens, J., Dias, J., van der Zwaan, J. (eds) Emotion Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8750. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12973-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12973-0_2

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