A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers

The study of agent helpers using linguistic strategies such as vague language and politeness has often come across obstacles. One of these is the quality of the agent's voice and its lack of appropriate fit for using these strategies. The first approach of this article compares human vs. synthe...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adolphs, Svenja, Clark, Leigh, Ofemile, Abdulmalik, Rodden, Tom
Format: Article
Published: ACM 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45263/
_version_ 1848797100128600064
author Adolphs, Svenja
Clark, Leigh
Ofemile, Abdulmalik
Rodden, Tom
author_facet Adolphs, Svenja
Clark, Leigh
Ofemile, Abdulmalik
Rodden, Tom
author_sort Adolphs, Svenja
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description The study of agent helpers using linguistic strategies such as vague language and politeness has often come across obstacles. One of these is the quality of the agent's voice and its lack of appropriate fit for using these strategies. The first approach of this article compares human vs. synthesised voices in agents using vague language. This approach analyses the 60,000-word text corpus of participant interviews to investigate the differences of user attitudes towards the agents, their voices and their use of vague language. It discovers that while the acceptance of vague language is still met with resistance in agent instructors, using a human voice yields more positive results than the synthesised alternatives. The second approach in this article discusses the development of a novel multimodal corpus of video and text data to create multiple analyses of human-agent interaction in agent-instructed assembly tasks. The second approach analyses user spontaneous facial actions and gestures during their interaction in the tasks. It found that agents are able to elicit these facial actions and gestures and posits that further analysis of this nonverbal feedback may help to create a more adaptive agent. Finally, the approaches used in this article suggest these can contribute to furthering the understanding of what it means to interact with software agents.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T19:58:30Z
format Article
id nottingham-45263
institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T19:58:30Z
publishDate 2016
publisher ACM
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling nottingham-452632020-05-04T18:18:20Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45263/ A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers Adolphs, Svenja Clark, Leigh Ofemile, Abdulmalik Rodden, Tom The study of agent helpers using linguistic strategies such as vague language and politeness has often come across obstacles. One of these is the quality of the agent's voice and its lack of appropriate fit for using these strategies. The first approach of this article compares human vs. synthesised voices in agents using vague language. This approach analyses the 60,000-word text corpus of participant interviews to investigate the differences of user attitudes towards the agents, their voices and their use of vague language. It discovers that while the acceptance of vague language is still met with resistance in agent instructors, using a human voice yields more positive results than the synthesised alternatives. The second approach in this article discusses the development of a novel multimodal corpus of video and text data to create multiple analyses of human-agent interaction in agent-instructed assembly tasks. The second approach analyses user spontaneous facial actions and gestures during their interaction in the tasks. It found that agents are able to elicit these facial actions and gestures and posits that further analysis of this nonverbal feedback may help to create a more adaptive agent. Finally, the approaches used in this article suggest these can contribute to furthering the understanding of what it means to interact with software agents. ACM 2016-12-01 Article PeerReviewed Adolphs, Svenja, Clark, Leigh, Ofemile, Abdulmalik and Rodden, Tom (2016) A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 6 (4). 29/1-29/31. ISSN 2160-6463 Human-agent interaction vague language instruction giving gestures facial actions emotions http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3015563.2983926 doi:10.1145/2983926 doi:10.1145/2983926
spellingShingle Human-agent interaction
vague language
instruction giving
gestures
facial actions
emotions
Adolphs, Svenja
Clark, Leigh
Ofemile, Abdulmalik
Rodden, Tom
A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title_full A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title_fullStr A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title_full_unstemmed A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title_short A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
title_sort multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers
topic Human-agent interaction
vague language
instruction giving
gestures
facial actions
emotions
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45263/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45263/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/45263/