A Survey of Listener Behavior and Listener Models for Embodied Conversational Agents - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 264

one hand, the authors wanted to get a better understanding about the
relation between the form of this type of signals and their functional
meaning and on the other hand, they aimed to gain insight into the
way people interpret backchannels performed by virtual humanoids.
The chapter is concluded by a description of the progress made in
the human-machine interface field to create ECAs able to show an
appropriate listening behavior. A classification of listener models has
been proposed. As we have seen, most of the systems generate the
listening agent's behavior only according to the user's behavior. Even
if such a strategy allows for creating virtual agents that look like if
they are listening, interacting with them is still limited and frustrating:
a user perceives quite easily that the agent does not really understand
what she/he is saying. Very few systems take into account the content
of the user's speech and they are still restricted to specific domains.
An agent able to show a listening behavior that is coherent both with
the user's behavior and with the content of the speech remains a big
challenge.
Acknowledgements
The perceptual studies presented in this chapter have been conducted
in collaboration with other colleagues. We wish to acknowledge the
precious work done by Catherine Pelachaud, Dirk Heylen, Marc
Schröder, Sylwia Hyniewska, Sathish Pammi and Marion Tellier.
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