Social Attitude Recognition in Multimodal Interaction with a Pedagogical Agent

Abstract

Conversational agents have been widely used in pedagogical contexts. They have the advantage of offering to users not only a task-oriented support, but also the possibility to relate with the system at social level. Therefore, besides endowing the conversational agent with knowledge necessary to fulfill pedagogical goals, it is important to provide the agent with social intelligence. To do so the agent should be able to recognize the social attitude of the user during the interaction in order to accommodate the conversational strategy. In this paper we illustrate how we defined and applied a model for recognizing the social attitude of the student in natural interaction with a Pedagogical Conversational Agent (PCA) starting from the linguistic, acoustic and gestural analysis of the communicative act.