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Investigating culture-related aspects of behavior for virtual characters

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Abstract

In this paper, culture-related behaviors are investigated on several channels of communication for virtual characters. Prototypical behaviors were formalized in computational models based on a literature review as well as a corpus analysis, exemplifying the German and Japanese cultures. Therefore, aspects of verbal behavior, communication management and nonverbal behavior were taken into account. In evaluation studies conducted in the targeted cultures, each aspect’s impact on human observers was tested. With it, we investigated for which of the aspects, observers prefer agent behavior that was designed to resemble their own cultural background.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Program under Grant agreement eCute. This paper constitutes a summary of a PhD thesis which was partly covered by a Grant from the Elitenetzwerk Bayern (Elite Network Bavaria). Earlier parts of the work were done in scope of the Cube-G project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Centered Multimedia, Augsburg University, Augsburg, Germany

    Birgit Endrass & Elisabeth André

  2. Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Matthias Rehm

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Yukiko Nakano

Authors
  1. Birgit Endrass
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  2. Elisabeth André
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  3. Matthias Rehm
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  4. Yukiko Nakano
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Correspondence to Birgit Endrass.

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Endrass, B., André, E., Rehm, M. et al. Investigating culture-related aspects of behavior for virtual characters. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 27, 277–304 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-012-9218-5

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