Crafting the illusion of meaning: template-based specification of embodied conversational behavior

Templates are a widespread natural language technology that achieves believability within a narrow range of interaction and coverage. We consider templates for embodied conversational behavior. Such templates combine a specific pattern of marked-up text, specifying prosody and conversational signals as well as words, with similarly annotated gaps that can be filled in by rule to yield a coherent contribution to a dialogue with a user. In this paper we argue that templates can give a designer substantial freedom to realize specific combinations of behaviors in interactions with users and thereby to explore the relationships among such factors as emotion, personality, individuality and social role.