Speaker Presentation Abstracts

Justine Cassell

Getting by with a Little Help from your (Virtual) Friends
In this talk I report on a series of studies that attempt to characterize the role of language and nonverbal behavior in relationship-building and rapport in humans, and then to use the results to implement virtual humans capable of rapport with their users.  In particular, we are implementing virtual survey interviewers that can use rapport to elicit truthful responses, and virtual direction-giving agents that behave differently as they give directions over the lifetime of use.  We are implementing virtual peers that can engage in collaborative learning with children within different dialect communities, virtual peers that can scaffold the learning of rapport behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder, and virtual peers that can be used to assess the social skills deficits of children with autism spectrum disorder so as to better plan their treatment. The goal of the research program is to better understand linguistic and nonverbal coordination devices from the utterance level to the relationship level ­ how they work in humans, how they can be modeled in virtual humans, and how virtual humans can be implemented to help humans have productive and satisfying relationships, with machines and with one another, over long periods of time.

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Yolanda Rankin

More Than Just a Game:  Critical In-Game Interactions
That Facilitate Second Language Acquisition
Unlike recreational games, serious games do more than entertain the player. Serious games promote acquisition of information and skills that are valued in both the virtual world and the real world.  Designing a serious game requires a considerable amount of resources, including time, money, and a talented development team.  Even with these efforts, it is possible to design a serious game that lacks the element of fun.  Rather than designing a serious game from scratch, we re-purpose the commercial Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) EverQuest® II as a serious game, leveraging the entertainment value and readily available development tools to promote learning in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). First, we identify the affordances attributed to MMORPGs and evaluate the impact of gameplay experiences on students’ SLA.  Promising results from experimental studies reveal that in-game social interactions in the target language between native speakers and non native speakers increase second language vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension skills compared to traditional classroom instruction. Finally, we develop ClockWerk©, a temporal visualization tool that graphically depicts dominant communication patterns of linguistically diverse groups of players during gameplay, enabling us to gauge their impact on SLA. 

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