Synthesising and Evaluating Cross-Modal Emotional Ambiguity in Virtual Agents

Matthew P. Aylett, Blaise Potard

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Emotional ambiguity, when more than one emotion appears present at a given time, or several emotions are superimposed, is common in human interaction and effects such as irony can be intentionally created through a mismatch of such emotional signals. High quality emotional speech synthesis offers a means for testing the effect of combining differences in vocal emotion, facial expression and text content in a virtual agent. In this paper we combine high quality emotional speech synthesis with a video rendered non-naturalistic virtual agent. Vocal emotion and text content combined to increase or decrease the emotional valence (positivity) of an utterance, while emotional facial expressions did not affect valence, but interacted with vocal emotion altering emotional activation in the lax and stressed vocal condition.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIntelligent Virtual Agents
Subtitle of host publication12th International Conference, IVA 2012, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, September, 12-14, 2012. Proceedings
EditorsYukiko Nakano, Michael Neff, Ana Paiva, Marilyn Walker
Place of PublicationBerlin, Heidelberg
PublisherSpringer
Pages471-473
Number of pages3
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-33197-8
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-33196-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer Berlin Heidelberg
Volume7502
ISSN (Print)0302-9743

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