Accession Number:

AD1160292

Title:

Virtual Rapport 2.0

Descriptive Note:

[Technical Report, Research Paper]

Corporate Author:

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES

Personal Author(s):

• Huang, Lixing
• Morency, Louis-Philippe
• Gratch, Jonathan

Report Date:

2011-01-01

Pagination or Media Count:

13

Abstract:

Rapport, the feeling of being in sync with your conversational partners, is argued to underlie many desirable social effects. By generating proper verbal and nonverbal behaviors, virtual humans have been seen to create rapport during interactions with human users. In this paper, we introduce our approach to creating rapport following Tickle-Degnen and Rosenbergs three factor positivity, mutual attention and coordination theory of rapport. By comparing with a previously published virtual agent, the Rapport Agent, we show that our virtual human predicts the timing of backchannel feedback and end-of-turn more precisely, performs more natural behaviors and, thereby creates much stronger feelings of rapport between users and virtual agents.

Descriptors:

• multiagent systems
• human behavior
• data sets
• psychology
• signal processing
• social sciences
• computer science
• machine learning
• social psychology
• autonomous agents
• bayesian networks
• computers
• data analysis
• demographic cohorts
• language
• models
• detectors

Subject Categories:

• Psychology
• Linguistics

Distribution Statement:

[A, Approved For Public Release]