Abstract
Giving synthetic agents human-like realtime turntaking skills is a challenging task. Attempts have been made to manually construct such skills, with systematic categorization of silences, prosody and other candidate turn-giving signals, and to use analysis of corpora to produce static decision trees for this purpose. However, for general-purpose turntaking skills which vary between individuals and cultures, a system that can learn them on-the-job would be best. We are exploring ways to use machine learning to have an agent learn proper turntaking during interaction. We have implemented a talking agent that continuously adjusts its turntaking behavior to its interlocutors based on realtime analysis of the other party’s prosody. Initial results from experiments on collaborative, content-free dialogue show that, for a given subset of turn-taking conditions, our modular reinforcement learning techniques allow the system to learn to take turns in an efficient, human-like manner.
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Jonsdottir, G.R., Thorisson, K.R., Nivel, E. (2008). Learning Smooth, Human-Like Turntaking in Realtime Dialogue. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J., Ishizuka, M. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_17
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