This paper presents an overview of AVASAG; an ongoing applied-research project developing a text-to-sign-language translation system for public services. We describe the scientific innovation points (geometry-based SL-description, 3D animation and video corpus, simplified annotation scheme, motion capture strategy) and the overall translation pipeline.

Human-AI collaboration, a long standing goal in AI, refers to a partnership where a human and artificial intelligence work together towards a shared goal. Collaborative dialog allows human-AI teams to communicate and leverage strengths from both partners. To design collaborative dialog systems, it is important to understand what mental models users form about their AI-dialog partners, however, how users perceive these systems is not fully understood. In this study, we designed a novel, collaborative, communication-based puzzle game and explanatory dialog system. We created a public corpus from 117 conversations and post-surveys and used this to analyze what mental models users formed. Key takeaways include: Even when users were not engaged in the game, they perceived the AI-dialog partner as intelligent and likeable, implying they saw it as a partner separate from the game. This was further supported by users often overestimating the system’s abilities and projecting human-like attributes which led to miscommunications. We conclude that creating shared mental models between users and AI systems is important to achieving successful dialogs. We propose that our insights on mental models and miscommunication, the game, and our corpus provide useful tools for designing collaborative dialog systems.

Humor is an important aspect in human interaction to regulate conversations, increase interpersonal attraction and trust. For social robots, humor is one aspect to make interactions more natural, enjoyable, and to increase credibility and acceptance. In combination with appropriate non-verbal behavior, natural language generation offers the ability to create content on-the-fly. This work outlines the building-blocks for providing an individual, multimodal interaction experience by shaping the robot’s humor with the help of Natural Language Generation and Reinforcement Learning based on human social signals.

Feature extraction is still a disputed issue for the recognition of emotions from speech. Differences in features for male and female speakers are a well-known problem and it is established that gender-dependent emotion recognizers perform better than gender-independent ones. We propose a way to improve the discriminative quality of gender-dependent features: The emotion recognition system is preceded by an automatic gender detection that decides upon which of two gender-dependent emotion classifiers is used to classify an utterance. This framework was tested on two different databases, one with emotional speech produced by actors and one with spontaneous emotional speech from a Wizard-of-Oz setting. Gender detection achieved an accuracy of about 90 % and the combined gender and emotion recognition system improved the overall recognition rate of a gender-independent emotion recognition system by 2-4 %.