Towards a cognitively motivated processing of turn-taking signals for the embodied conversational agent Max

Abstract

Max is a human-size conversational agent that employs synthetic speech, gesture, gaze, and facial display to act in cooperative construction tasks taking place in immersive\nvirtual reality. In the mixed-initiative dialogs involved in\nour research scenario, turn-taking abilities and dialog competences play a crucial role for Max to appear as a convincing multimodal communication partner. The way how they rely on Max’s perception of the user and, in special, how turn-taking signals are handled in the agent’s cognitive architecture is the focus of this paper.