Culture-specific communication management for virtual agents

Human interaction depends on several individual factors such as personality, social relations, age or gender. But also the society we live in influences our behaviour. Thus culture affects the way communication is led. As virtual agents interact in a more and more human-like manner, culture-specific behaviour should also be taken into account. In this paper, we investigate communication management as one aspect of communication. Our findings in culture related differences are based on a video corpus that was recorded in Germany and Japan as well as on findings described in the literature. To this end, the use of pauses in speech as well as the occurrence of overlapping speech was analyzed and integrated into a demonstrator using virtual agents. In a preliminary study, we investigated whether subjects perceive a difference between agent dialogs that are in line with culture-specific findings and agent dialogs that are not.