Smiles are a fundamental facial expression for successful human-agent communication. The growing number of publications in this domain presents an opportunity for future research and design to be informed by a scoping review of the extant literature. This semi-automated review expedites the first steps toward the mapping of Virtual Human (VH) smile research. This paper contributes an overview of the status quo of VH smile research, identifies research streams through cluster analysis, identifies prolific authors in the field, and provides evidence that a full scoping review is needed to synthesize the findings in the expanding domain of VH smile research. To enable collaboration, we provide full access to the refined VH smile dataset, key word and author word clouds, as well as interactive evidence maps.

When dealing with large, distributed systems that use state-of-the-art components, individual components are usually developed in parallel. As development continues, the decoupling invariably leads to a mismatch between how these components internally represent concepts and how they communicate these representations to other components: representations can get out of synch, contain localized errors, or become manageable only by a small group of experts for each module. In this paper, we describe the use of an ontology as part of a complex distributed virtual human architecture in order to enable better communication between modules while improving the overall flexibility needed to change or extend the system. We focus on the natural language understanding capabilities of this architecture and the relationship between language and concepts within the entire system in general and the ontology in particular.