When should animated agents give additional instructions to users? - Monitoring user’s understanding in multimodal dialogues -

In multimodal communication, verbal and nonverbal behaviors such as gestures and manipulating objects in a workspace occur in parallel, and are coordinated in proper timing to each other. This paper focuses on the interaction between a beginner user using a video recorder application on PC and a multimodal animated help agent, and presents a probabilistic model of fine-grained timing dependencies among different behaviors of different modalities. First, we collect user-agent dialogues using a Wizard-of-Oz experimental setting, and then the collected verbal and nonverbal behavior data will be used to build a Bayesian network model, which can predict the likelihood of successful mouse clicks in near future, given evidence associated with the status of speech, agent’s gestures and user’s mouse actions. Finally, we attempt to determine proper timing when the agent should give additional instructions by estimating the likelihood of a mouse click occurrence.