A Verbal and Gestural Corpus of Story Retellings to an Expressive Embodied Virtual Character

Jackson Tolins, Kris Liu, Michael Neff, Marilyn Walker, Jean Fox Tree


Abstract
We present a corpus of 44 human-agent verbal and gestural story retellings designed to explore whether humans would gesturally entrain to an embodied intelligent virtual agent. We used a novel data collection method where an agent presented story components in installments, which the human would then retell to the agent. At the end of the installments, the human would then retell the embodied animated agent the story as a whole. This method was designed to allow us to observe whether changes in the agent’s gestural behavior would result in human gestural changes. The agent modified its gestures over the course of the story, by starting out the first installment with gestural behaviors designed to manifest extraversion, and slowly modifying gestures to express introversion over time, or the reverse. The corpus contains the verbal and gestural transcripts of the human story retellings. The gestures were coded for type, handedness, temporal structure, spatial extent, and the degree to which the participants’ gestures match those produced by the agent. The corpus illustrates the variation in expressive behaviors produced by users interacting with embodied virtual characters, and the degree to which their gestures were influenced by the agent’s dynamic changes in personality-based expressive style.
Anthology ID:
L16-1552
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3461–3468
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1552
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jackson Tolins, Kris Liu, Michael Neff, Marilyn Walker, and Jean Fox Tree. 2016. A Verbal and Gestural Corpus of Story Retellings to an Expressive Embodied Virtual Character. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3461–3468, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Verbal and Gestural Corpus of Story Retellings to an Expressive Embodied Virtual Character (Tolins et al., LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1552.pdf