Responsive Social Agents

Abstract

How can we generate appropriate behavior for social artificial agents? A common approach is to (1) establish with controlled experiments which action is most appropriate in which setting, and (2) select actions based on this knowledge and an estimate of the setting. This approach faces challenges, as it can be very hard to acquire and reason with all the required knowledge. Estimating the setting is challenging too, as many relevant aspects of the setting (e.g. personality of the interactee) can be unobservable. We formally describe an alternative approach that can handle these challenges; responsiveness. This is the idea that a social agent can utilize the many feedback cues given in social interactions to continuously adapt its behavior to something more appropriate. We theoretically discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches, which allows for more explicitly considering their application in social agents.