Keywords: backchannels, grounding in conversation, human-robot interaction, social virtual agents, listener responses
Abstract: In spoken interaction, humans constantly display and interpret each others’
state of understanding. For an embodied agent, displaying its internal
state of understanding in an efficient manner can be an important means
for making a user-interaction more natural and initiate error recovery as
early as possible. We carry out an overhearer study with 62 participants
to investigate whether German verbal and non-verbal backchannels by the
virtual Furhat embodied agent can be interpreted by an overhearer of a
human-robot conversation. We compare three positive, three negative, and
one neutral feedback reaction. We find that even though it is difficult to generate
certain verbal backchannels, our participants can recognize displays of
understanding with an accuracy of up to 0.92. Trying to communicate a lack
of understanding is more often misunderstood (accuracy: 0.55), meaning
that interaction designers need to carefully craft them in order to be useful
for the interaction flow.
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