Scope
Research into expressive characters, for example embodied conversational agents, is a growing field, while new work in human-robot interaction (HRI) has also focussed on issues of expressive behaviour. With recent developments in computer graphics, natural language engineering and speech processing, much of the technological platform for expressive characters — both graphical and robotic — is in place. However, progress is hampered by the need to integrate work in various sub-fields of psychology, in natural language processing, speech and in computer graphics, carried out by many different groups in communities that do not always intersect. Other areas, such as integrating gesture and facial expression and affective state with language and speech, are less developed but vital to progress.
The symposium aims to bring together psychologists, experts in natural language and speech technologies, researchers in embodied agents (graphical and robotic), affective computing and computer graphics and animation researchers. It invites contributions on the topic of speech and natural language processing for expressive characters, including:
- appropriate natural language processing architectures;
- natural language generation;
- dialogue systems and question answering,
- language and gesture coordination;
- language and facial expression coordination;
- language and action integration,
- emotional language;
- personality modelling, language and speech
- lip synchronisation and combination with facial expression;
- affect in speech synthesis and recognition.
- empirical studies of gesture and facial expression;
- frameworks for the specification and analysis of gesture and facial
- expression for expressive characters;
- gesture and facial expression modelling and animation;
- evaluation of expressive characters