Article Summary Of:

Traum, D. and Rickel, J. 2002. Embodied agents for multi-party dialogue in immersive virtual worlds. In Proceedings of the First international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: Part 2 (Bologna, Italy, July 15 - 19, 2002). AAMAS '02. ACM Press, New York, NY, 766-773. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/544862.544922

Primary Topic(s) Addressed:  agents

Secondary Topic(s) Addressed:  human communication, virtual reality

How this might be used on my dissertation:

If my dissertation involves human communication in virtual environments, and how we might go about raising it (allow for non-verbal communication, politeness theory, etc- that humans use in everyday communication)

Questions Raised (potential topic for me):

How might we go about raising human communication levels (more channels supported) in virtual environments?

How might agents employ more of these human communication techniques?

Summary of Paper:

Author explains how there is a lack of human communication channels used by agents in virtual environments.

Huge potential for improvement of face-to-face communication in a virtual environment.  Author uses many human communication theories, and suggests that communication agents can use these communication tools to raise levels of interaction among agents in a virtual environment.

 

Dialogue model involves:  information state, dialogue acts, recognition rules, selection rules, realization rules

Layers of communication:  contact layer, attention layer, conversation layer, negotiation layer (big -> small)

Conversation:  participants -> initiatives -> grounding -> topic -> rhetorical connections -> social commitments -> negotiation (turn taking)

Terms / Definitions defined:

1. see models mentioned above
2. many communication theories referenced (look here)

Good Quotes:

see paper (circled)