Enculturating Conversational Agents based on a Comparative Corpus Study

When encountering people who have a different cultural background from our own, many of us feel uncomfortable because gestures and facial expressions may not be familiar to us. Thus, to enhance the believability of conversational agents, culture-specific nonverbal behaviors should be implemented into the agents. In our previous study, with the goal of building a user interface that incorporates a user’s cultural background, we have collected comparative conversation corpus in Germany and Japan, and investigated the differences in gestures and posture shifts between these two countries. This paper reports a more detailed analysis about posture shifts, and proposes a chat system with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) that can act as a language trainer.