<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W00-1423">
  <Title>Coordination and context-dependence in the generation of embodied conversation</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="176" end_page="176" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The interpretation of speech and gesture has been investigated since the pioneering work of (Bolt, 1980) on deictic gesture; recent work includes (Koons et al., 1993; Bolt and Herranz, 1992). Systems have also attempted generation of gesture in conjunction with speech. Lester et al. (1998) generate deictic gestures and choose referring expressions as a function of the potential ambiguity of objects referred to, and their proximity to the animated agent.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Rickel and Johnson (1999)'s pedagogical agent produces a deictic gesture at the beginning of explanations about objects in the virtual world. Andr6 et al. (1999) generate pointing gestures as a sub-action of the rhetorical action of labeling, in turn a sub-action of elaborating.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Missing from these prior systems, however, is a representation of communicative action that treats the different modalities on a par. Such representations have been explored in research on combining linguistic and graphical interaction. For example, multimodal managers have been described to allocate an underlying content representation for generation of text and graphics (Wahlster et al., 1991; Green et al., 1998). Meanwhile, (Johnston et al., 1997; Johnston, 1998) describe a formalism for tightly-coupled interpretation which uses a grammar and semantic constraints to analyze input from speech and pen. While many insights from these formalisms are relevant in embodied conversation, spontaneous gesture requires a distinct analysis with different emphasis:For example;-we need some notion of discourse pragmatics that would allow us to predict where gesture occurs with respect to speech, Conclusion .....</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Research on the robustness of human conversation suggests that a dialogue agent capable of acting as a conversational partner would provide for efficient and natural collaborative dialogue. But human conversational partners display gestures that derive from the same underlying conceptual source as their speech, and which relate appropriately to their communicative intent. In this paper, we have summarized the evidence for this view of human conversation, and shown how it informs the generation of communicative action in our artificial embodied conversational agent, REA. REA has a working implementation, which includes the modules described in this paper, and can engage in a variety of interactions including that in (5). Experiments are underway to investigate the extent to which REA 'S conversational capacities share the strengths of the human capacities they are modeled on.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>