En route to a better integration and evaluation of social capacities in vocal artificial agents

Abstract

In this talk, work about vocal artificial agent ongoing in the Vocal Interaction Group at LIA, University of Avignon, is presented. A focus is made on the research line aiming at endowing such interactive agents with human-like social abilities. After a short overview of the state-of-the-art in spoken dialogue systems a summary of recent efforts to improve systems' development through online learning using social signals is proposed. Then two examples of skills favoring human-like social interactions are presented: firstly a new turn-taking management scheme based on incremental processing and reinforcement learning, then automatic generation and usage optimisaton of humor traits. These studies converge in enabling to develop interactive systems which could foster studies in human sciences to better understand specificities of human social communication.