Designing the Impression of Social Agents' Real-time Interruption Handling

Human interaction partners can deal with interruptions and then resume the interaction. This ability should be emulated by social agents. How fast interruptions are handled might influence the overall impression of an agent. In this paper, we present the results of a user study on how a human dialog partner perceives the be- havior of a virtual agent handling verbal user interruptions with different reaction times. The study goes beyond typical perception experiments by preserving the real-time interaction experience. For the evaluation, we rely on a parametrizable parallelized computa- tional model that represents dialog flow, overlap detection, conflict recognition, and conflict handling in real-time. The evaluation re- sults show that the timing of the agent's interruption handling in interactive human-agent dialogues is related to different interper- sonal attitudes.