Demonstrating and Testing the BML Compliance of BML Realizers

Herwin van Welbergen, Yuyu Xu, Marcus Thiébaux, Wei-Wen Feng, Jingqiao Fu, Dennis Reidsma, Ari Shapiro

Abstract: BML realizers are complex software modules that implement a standardized interface –the BML specification language– to steer the behavior of a virtual human. We aim to promote and test the compliance of realizers that implement this interface. To this end we contribute a corpus of example BML scripts and a tool called RealizerTester that can be used to formally test and maintain adherence of realizers to the BML standard. The standardized interface of realizers allowed us to implement RealizerTester as an automatic testing framework that can test any realizer. RealizerTester can 1) help in maintaining the stability and extensibility that is crucial for realizers and 2) contribute to the formalization of the emerging BML standard, both by providing test scripts and a formal description of their constraints and by identifying and resolving execution inconsistencies between realizers. We illustrate the testing practices used in the development of two realizers and demonstrate how RealizerTester is integrated with these practices. The scripts in the example corpus were executed on both realizers. This resulted in a video corpus that demonstrates the semantic equivalences and differences in execution of BML scripts by the two realizers.