Dr Scott King and Dr Alistair Knott, Department of Computer Science

Title: "Kare, a bi-lingual animated conversational agent"
We will describe an animated conversational agent called Kare which integrates a talking head interface with a linguistically motivated human-machine dialogue system. The agent has a range of nonverbal behaviors, which involve a mixture of machine vision, computer animation and natural language processing techniques. The system's architecture couples the agent's non-verbal communicative processes very tightly to its model of verbal interaction. We discuss several consequences of this architecture, in particular the ability to use different non-verbal dialogue management signals when speaking different languages.