Multimodal Corpus Analysis as a Method for Ensuring Cultural Usability of Embodied Conversational Agents

In this paper we propose the method of multimodal corpus analysis to collect enough empirical data for modeling the behavior of embodied conversational agents. This is a prerequisite to ensure the usability of such complex interactive systems. So far, the development of embodied agents suffers from a lack of explicit usability methods. In most cases, the consideration of usability aspects is constrained to preliminary user tests at the end of the development process.