The next seminar in the series Linguistics Circle Seminar Series will be held on Wednesday 26 October at 12:00 in Hall D1, M.A. Vassalli Conference Centre – Gateway Building (GWHD1). During the seminar Catherine Pelachaud (LTCI, TELECOM Paris), will talk about 'TechModeling conversational nonverbal behaviors for virtual characters'.

Catherine Pelachaud will present the on-going effort to model virtual character with nonverbal capacities.

Greta, an interactive Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) platform, is being developed. It is endowed with socio-emotional and communicative behaviors. Through its behaviors, the agent can sustain a conversation as well as show various attitudes and levels of engagement.

The ECA is able to display a large variety of multimodal behaviors to convey communicative intentions. The project relies on a lexicon that contains entries defined as multimodal signals temporally coordinated. At run time, the signals for given communicative intentions and emotions are instantiated and their animations realised. Communicative behaviors are not produced in isolation from one another. Models that generate sequences of behaviors have been developed; these behaviors are not instantiated individually but the surrounding behaviors are taken into account.