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which influence cross-cultural interactions, and it is hard to describe them as
rules or habits. These differences appear not only in languages and their use,
but also in facial expressions, face directions, gestures, the range of movements,
postures, interpersonal distance, and so on [8].
We are studying how ECAs express communication behavior which is not
known as rules in a culture, such as emotional representation, the degree of
agreement or disagreement, and commitment to the communication, based on
cross-cultural background. In this paper, ”cultural background” means mean-
ingful customs, habits, gestures, nonverbal information and mental stances in a
particular culture. We expect that the cultural background influences commu-
nication behavior. For the studies, we pay attention to gaze (head orientation),
postures, hand gestures and paralinguistic features (pitch and power of voice).
We will investigate them in a negotiation situation in which people have to
express their opinions and speculate the inner states of their communication
partner.
Cultural behavior is observed in diverse situations and representations. Dif-
ferent layers of phenomena exist that are influenced by cultural aspects such as
the verbal and nonverbal behavior, appearance, proxemics, learning strategies
and many more. We thus have to consider different appearance and physical lim-
itations when ECAs express cultural behavior. Moreover, it is hard to pinpoint
down the constituents of culture and its effect on interaction [13]. Therefore, we
have to design ECAs based on data which is obtained in actual human-agent
interaction. It is hard to apply the foundations of cross-cultural communication
by analyzing data obtained in human-human communication to ECAs which
have different appearance and physical limitations than humans.
We, however, did not have an environment to obtain the data in actual human-
agent interaction. In other words, we need to analyze enculturated agent-human
interaction in an environment in which a human can interact with another human
who has the appearance and physical limitations of ECAs.
The purpose of this study is to propose an environment in which a person
can interact with ECAs controlled by captured behavior of another person with
cultural background, so that we can analyze the data obtained in actual encultur-
ated agent-human interaction. The proposed environment is called Capture and
Express Behavior Environment (CEBE). Human behavior in CEBE is expressed
by an ECA which has a different appearance and physical limitations from a
human. If the ECA could express enculturated behavior by CEBE, a standalone
ECA which has the same appearance and physical limitations could express en-
culturated behavior without pinpointing down the constituents. Therefore, we
expect that CEBE is a useful tool to analyze cross-cultural behavior expressed
by ECAs. We discussed the prototype of CEBE in general situations in another
paper [10]. In this paper, we introduce the basic architecture and the proto-
type, and we discuss modifications and concepts of CEBE to apply CEBE for
investigations to realize an ECA with cultural background.
CEBE will be used as a Wizard of OZ (WOZ) system in two types of research.
The first is data capturing to realize agents which have a communication skill
