Communication and Valerie

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Communication and Valerie

• Rachel Gockley
• Project for People and Robots Meeting
• 24 March 2004

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Outline

• Literature Review How do people communicate?
• Design Recommendations What does this mean for
  Valerie?

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How people communicate

• Approach
• Initiation
• Conversational Content
• (Leave-taking)

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Approach and greeting

• A description of some human greetings (Adam
  Kendon and Andrew Ferber)

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Approach and greeting

• Greeting that unit of social interaction often
  observed when people come into one anothers
  presence, which includes a distinctive exchange
  of gestures or utterances in which each person
  appears to signal to the other, directly and
  explicitly, that he has been seen.

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Approach and greeting sighting

• Identification of another as someone you want to
  greet

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Approach and greeting distance salutation

• After both parties have sighted each other
• Types
• Head toss (head tilts up, then returns)
• Head nod (head tilts down, then returns)
• Head lower (head tilts down, pause, then returns)
• Wave (various kinds)

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Approach and greeting approach

• Usually look away while approaching
• Common behaviors
• Body cross
• Grooming
• Final approach look at each other, smile

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Approach and greeting close salutation

• Culmination of the greeting transaction
• Greeting ceremony
• May include handshakes, embraces, etc.

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Initiation of communication

• Face Engagements (Erving Goffman)

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Initiation opening moves

• Special expression of the eyes, statement, or
  special tone of voice at the beginning of a
  statement
• Acknowledged by other party
• Eyes, voice, or stance
• Can be exchanged almost simultaneously

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Initiation civil inattention

• Staring, with no recognition
• Usually look away or embarrassed if caught
• Can be used to preclude conversation

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Content

• When people talk with people (John C. Condon,
  Jr.)
• Grounding in communication (Herbert H. Clark
  and Susan E. Brennan)

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Content grounding

• Grounding is the collective process by which the
  participants try to reach this mutual belief
  that each has understood the other.

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Content presentation and acceptance

• Presentation phase
• A Now, - um, do you and your husband have a j-
  car
• Acceptance phase
• B - have a car?
• A yeah

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Content evidence

• Negative evidence
• Indicates that you have been misunderstood
• Lack of negative evidence doesnt always imply
  understanding!
• Positive evidence
• uh-huh, yeah, head-nodding, etc

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Content chunking

• Break verbatim content into small, repeatable
  installments
• Phone numbers, addresses, book titles, credit
  card numbers, recipes, etc.

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Content cost

• Costs to speaker
• Formulation, production
• Costs to addressee
• Reception, understanding
• Costs to both
• Start-up, delay, asynchrony, speaker change,
  display, fault, repair

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Content cost

• Cost of acknowledgement
• Higher cost to provide positive evidence at
  keyboard!
• Principle of least collaborative effort
• In conversation, the participants try to
  minimize their collaborative effortthe work that
  both do from the initiation of each contribution
  to its mutual acceptance.

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Content prevention

• Direct dismissal (I dont want to talk to you
  anymore)
• Dismissal reactions (Ha! Yeah, Ill bet.)
• Guarded utterances or grunts (Oh, really?
  Hmm.)
• Indicate a lack of interest in the speaker or
  subject

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A question

• So what does this mean for Valerie?

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A question

• First of all should Valerie act human-like?

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A hand-wavy answer

• Adult human-style communication entails each
  participant having a mechanism for predicting and
  interpreting other's actions, emotions and other
  mental states (Breazeal)
• Humans can be good models for synthetic agents
  in application areas where human-style
  interaction benefits the acceptance of a system,
  e.g. in domains which are primarily social.
  (Dautenhahn)

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Design Recommendations

• Identify people at a distance
• Even vision would only work up-close
• RFID?
• Recognize friends
• Smile as they come in the door
• Greet by name
• Recognize hostiles
• Pointedly ignore and/or blow off

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Design Recommendations (more)

• Modification of pitch, tone
• Only say hello when eye contact is made
• Natural language processing
• Mixed-initiative interactions
• If we know a particular person is likely to ask
  about x, then say x without being prompted
• Break monologues into smaller chunks to allow for
  greater interaction