Generating Culture-Specific Gestures for Virtual Agent Dialogs

Integrating culture into the behavioral model of virtual
agents has come into focus lately. When investigating verbal aspects of
behavior, nonverbal behaviors are desirably added automatically, driven
by the speech-act. In this paper, we present a corpus driven approach
of generating gestures in a culture-specific way that accompany agent
dialogs. The frequency of gestures and gesture-types, the correlation of
gesture-types and speech-acts as well as the expressivity of gestures have
been analyzed in the two cultures of Germany and Japan and integrated
into a demonstrator.