International workshop on audio-visual affective prosody in social interaction & second language learning

(AVAP 2015)

Bordeaux, 5 and 6 March 2015


Yoshimasa Ohmoto

How the affective internal states is expressed and interpreted in communication: two feasibility studies towards affective agents


Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan
co-authors: Takashi Ookaki, Masakazu Abe, Masahiro Yoshino, Jun Furutani, and Toyoaki Nishida




We want to develop an embodied conversational agent that is regarded as a social partner, not just multimodal interface. However, the mental stance of people when they interact with agents is usually different from when they interact with humans. Therefore, in some cases, it is difficult for people to speculate on an agent's emotions and for an agent to persuade people. This is a problem to solve for realizing affective communication with agents.
We take two approaches toward the problem: first, we obtain and analyze human behavior in discussion to find factors which influence humans' affective experiences using a method named Synthetic evidential study (SES for short), and second, we try to induce a positive mental stance of humans by agents' nonverbal behavior in a game situation. In this communication, we introduce two feasibility studies of them. [1] Nishida, T. et al. 2014a. Synthetic Evidential Study as Augmented Collective Thought Process -- Preliminary Report, ACIIDS 2015, accepted.
[2] Nishida, T., Nakazawa, A., Ohmoto, Y., Mohammad, Y.: Conversational Informatics.A Data-Intensive Approach with Emphasis on Nonverbal Communication, Springer (2014)
[3] M. Roubroeks, J. Ham, and C. Midden, “When artificial social agents try to persuade people: The role of social agency on the occurrence of psychological reactance,” International Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 155.165.
[4] D. C. Dennett, The intentional stance. MIT press, 1989.