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Catherine Pelachaud

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18 papers
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18

AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Decision Model for a Virtual Agent that can Touch and be Touched

  • Fabien Boucaud
  • Catherine Pelachaud
  • Indira Thouvenin

Touch is an essential sense to the social development and well-being of individuals, acting as a communicative channel for emotions and empathy. Our overall objective is to enhance the ability of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to bond with humans. To reach such an objective, we have endowed an ECA with the capacity to touch and be touched in a social interaction with a human in an immersive environment. By drawing inspiration from literature on human-human social touch and related works on human-agent tactile interactions, we have developed a framework for a touching ECA able to perceive when and how a user touches it and decide when and how to respond accordingly. This paper focuses on going beyond a simple bi-directional touch interaction through a decision model that actually adapts its behaviour to the content of the interaction, the level of rapport and the human’s touch avoidance sensibility. This enables an actual interactive loop between the agent and the human.

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AAMAS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Automatic Nonverbal Behavior Generation from Image Schemas

  • Brian Ravenet
  • Chlo� Clavel
  • Catherine Pelachaud

One of the main challenges when developing Embodied Conversational Agents is to give them the ability to autonomously produce meaningful and coordinated verbal and nonverbal behaviors. The relation between these means of communication is more complex than a direct mapping that has often been applied in previous models. In this paper, we propose an intermediate mapping approach we apply on metaphoric gestures first but that could be extended to other representational gestures. Leveraging from previous work in text analysis, embodied cognition and co-verbal behavior production, we introduce a framework articulating speech and metaphoric gesture invariants around a common mental representation: Image Schemas. We establish the components of our framework, detailing the different steps leading to the production of the metaphoric gestures, and we present some preliminary results and demonstrations. We end the paper by laying down the perspectives to integrate, evaluate and improve our model.

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AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

SOCRATES: from SOCial Relation to ATtitude ExpressionS

  • Florian Pecune
  • Magalie Ochs
  • Stacy Marsella
  • Catherine Pelachaud

To be perceived as believable partners in human-machine interactions, virtual agents have to express adequate social attitudes. The social attitude expressed by an agent should reflect the social situation of the interaction. The agent ought to take into account its role and its social relation toward its interactants when deciding how to react in the interaction. To build such an agent able to reason about its role and relation and to adapt its social attitude, we build a model of social decision making. First, we formalize the dynamics of the social relation through a combination of goals and beliefs. Then, we design a decision making model based on the social goals and the situational goals of the agent.

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AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

The Effects of Interrupting Behavior on Interpersonal Attitude and Engagement in Dyadic Interactions

  • Angelo Cafaro
  • Nadine Glas
  • Catherine Pelachaud

Interruptions frequently occur in dyadic human interaction. In addition to serve as turn-taking mechanism, they may lead to different perceptions of both the interruptee and interrupter’s interpersonal attitude, engagement and involvement. We present an empirical study to investigate whether different interruption types (i. e. amount of overlap between speakers and utterance completeness) and strategies (disruptive vs. cooperative) in agent-agent interaction have an impact on perceived agents’ interpersonal attitude, engagement and involvement. We found that the interruption type has more influence on the perceived attitudes of both agents, whereas by using a cooperative strategy (as opposed to a disruptive one) an interrupter is perceived as more engaged and more involved in the interaction.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

LOL — Laugh Out Loud

  • Florian Pecune
  • Beatrice Biancardi
  • Yu Ding
  • Catherine Pelachaud
  • Maurizio Mancini
  • Giovanna Varni
  • Antonio Camurri
  • Gualtiero Volpe
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AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Live Generation of Interactive Non-Verbal Behaviours

  • Ken Prepin
  • Catherine Pelachaud

Psychology, robotic and virtual agents communities commonly claim that to enable natural interaction to take place within dyad of agents, the dyad must be the siege of dynamical coupling: to give to their partners a feeling of natural interaction, interactants be human, robotic or virtual, must be able to make the dynamic of their behaviour emerge both from their own internal states and from their partner’s behaviours. However, most virtual agents engines for interactions model communication as a step by step phenomenon, where pre-scripted signals and corresponding feedbacks alternate. We propose here an agent architecture which generates non-verbal behaviours in live, influenced by both the internal state of the agent and the continuously incoming reaction of its partner. This architecture enables an agent facing either another agent or a human, to emphasise shared behaviours (called Snowball effect), to decrease un-shared behaviours as well as to align dynamically with its partner’s behaviour.

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AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Model of the Perception of Smiling Virtual Character

  • Magalie Ochs
  • Catherine Pelachaud

A smile may convey different communicative intentions depending on subtle characteristics of the facial expression. Moreover, during an interaction, the expression of smile impacts on the observer's perception of both the social stance of the speaker and of the content of the talk. In this paper, we describe a perceptual study where we explore the effects of virtual characters displaying different types of smiles (namely politeness and amusement) when speaking on the user's perception. Based on the collected data, a model to automatically compute the user's potential perception of the virtual character's social stance depending on its smiling behavior and on its gender has been proposed.

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AAMAS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Effect of Time Delays on Agents' Interaction Dynamics

  • Ken Prepin
  • Catherine Pelachaud

While speaking about social interaction, psychology claims as crucial the temporal correlations between interactants' behaviors: to give to their partners a feeling of natural interaction, interactants, be human, robotic or virtual, must be able to react on appropriate time. Recent approaches consider autonomous agents as dynamical systems and the interaction as a coupling between these systems. These approaches solve the issue of time handling and enable to model synchronization and turn-taking as phenomenon emerging with the coupling. But when complex computations are added to their architecture, such as processing of video and audio signals, delays appear within the interaction loop and disrupt this coupling. We model here a dyad of agents where processing delays are controlled. These agents, driven by oscillators, synchronize and take turns when there is no delay. We describe the methodology enabling to evaluate the synchrony and turn-taking emergence. We test oscillators coupling properties when there is no delay: coupling occurs if coupling strength is inferior to the parameter controlling oscillators natural period and if the ratio between oscillators periods is inferior to 1/2. We quantify the maximal delays between agents which do not disrupt the interaction: the maximal delay tolerated by agents is proportional to the natural period of the coupled system and to the strength of the coupling. These results are put in perspective with the different time constraints of human-human and human-agent interactions.

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JAAMAS Journal 2010 Journal Article

A formal model of emotions for an empathic rational dialog agent

  • Magalie Ochs
  • David Sadek
  • Catherine Pelachaud

Abstract Recent research has shown that virtual agents expressing empathic emotions toward users have the potential to enhance human–machine interaction. To provide empathic capabilities to a rational dialog agent, we propose a formal model of emotions based on an empirical and theoretical analysis of the users’ conditions of emotion elicitation. The emotions are represented by particular mental states of the agent, composed of beliefs, uncertainties and intentions. This semantically grounded formal representation enables a rational dialog agent to identify from a dialogical situation the empathic emotion that it should express. An implementation and an evaluation of an empathic rational dialog agent have enabled us to validate the proposed model of empathy.

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ICRA Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Generating Robot/Agent backchannels during a storytelling experiment

  • Sames Al Moubayed
  • Malek Baklouti
  • Mohamed Chetouani
  • Thierry Dutoit
  • Ammar Mahdhaoui
  • Jean-Claude Martin
  • Stanislav Ondás
  • Catherine Pelachaud

This work presents the development of a real-time framework for the research of multimodal feedback of robots/talking agents in the context of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). For evaluating the framework, a Multimodal corpus is built (ENTERFACE_STEAD), and a study on the important multimodal features was done for building an active Robot/Agent listener of a storytelling experience with Humans. The experiments show that even when building the same reactive behavior models for Robot and Talking Agents, the interpretation and the realization of the behavior communicated is different due to the different communicative channels Robots/Agents offer be it physical but less human-like in Robots, and virtual but more expressive and human-like in Talking agents.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Distinctiveness in multimodal behaviors

  • Maurizio Mancini
  • Catherine Pelachaud

While talking, people may move heavily their arms around, remain expressionless, or even display subtle facial movements. .. These differences may arise from personality, cultural, social factors and many more. In the present work, we are interested in defining a schema that characterizes distinctiveness in behaviors. Distinctiveness encompasses behaviors differences regarding (i) shape (which signals are performed) and (ii) quality (expressivity of movement, the way in which movements are performed). Thus, we aim to define embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that, given their communicative intention and behaviors tendencies definition, present distinctive behaviors.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Emotional Reading of Medical Texts Using Conversational Agents

  • Gersende Georg
  • Catherine Pelachaud
  • Marc Cavazza

In this paper, we present a prototype that helps visualizing the relative importance of sentences extracted from medical texts using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). We propose to map rhetorical structures automatically recognized in the documents onto a set of communicative acts controlling the expression of an ECA. As a consequence, the ECA will dramatize a sentence to reflect its perceived importance and rhetorical strength (advice, requirement, open proposal, etc). This prototype is constituted of three sub-systems: i) G-DEE, a text analysis module ii) a mapping module which converts rhetorical structures produced by the text analysis module into communicative functions driving the ECA animation and iii) an ECA system. By bringing the text to life, this system could help their authors (in our application, expert physicians) to reflect on the potential impact of the writing style they have adopted. The use of ECA reintroduces an affective element which cannot easily be captured by other methods for analyzing document’s style.

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KER Journal 2002 Journal Article

Multimodal embodied agents

  • Catherine Pelachaud
  • ISABELLA POGGI

1 Believable interactive embodied agents Among the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build believable interactive embodied agents that are apt to application to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired).

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v2026.09.13