Information Technology Reference
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with the roles and activities that the individuals in different cultures are involved in,
and consequently, cultural differences can be studied from point of view of social
activities that the individuals as members of various social groups take part in.
Intercultural communication can thus be analysed in terms of social activities and
interactions among individual agents, instead of contrasting stereotypical behaviours.
In ICT (Intercultural Communication Technology) virtual humans and embodied
communicative agents form an important application area and the behaviour of such
artificial agents is becoming more human-like. Such applications aim at recognizing
and monitoring the user's behaviour - both verbal and non-verbal - and providing
responses that are appropriate given the task (e.g. factual information exchange) and
the interaction context. As the context also includes cultural context, adaptation of the
agents to different languages and cultures is a relevant topic that needs to be modelled
as well. For instance, in educational applications, training environments, and virtual
companions such culture-specific factors affect the users' learning and enjoyment,
and taking them into consideration can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the
applications. In these cases, the starting point has usually been an explicit indication
of the level of understanding
by the user, and it has been common to study
conversational feedback and grounding processes in order to provide the users with
appropriate responses and effective help in problematic situations. This kind of
constructive feedback is useful if we consider the participants' understanding and
interpretation, i.e. the intake of the information and its grounding in the existing
background information. Hesitation related information is also important in this
context since it allows the interlocutors to express the degree of understanding and the
degree of commitment to the presented topic. In the smooth communication it is
important to convey agreement and emotional stance to the partner, i.e. besides their
cognitive understanding of the information, the speakers should also indicate their
degree of commitment to the presented information. Studies of various hesitation
related phenomena can therefore complement the grounding analysis in the analysis
and construction of shared understanding and mutual bonds.
Acknowledgements.
The first author thanks NICT and Doshisha University for the
opportunity to collect the interview data and conduct the first analyses while a NICT
Visiting Fellow at Doshisha University, Kyoto.
References
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Endrass, B., Rehm, M., André, E.: Culture-specific Communication Management for
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