Automating the Production of Communicative Gestures in Embodied Characters

In this paper we highlight the different challenges in modeling communicative gestures for Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). We describe models whose aim is to capture and understand the specific characteristics of communicative gestures in order to envision how an automatic communicative gesture production mechanism could be built. The work is inspired by research on how human gesture characteristics (e.g., shape of the hand, movement, orientation and timing with respect to the speech) convey meaning. We present approaches to computing where to place a gesture, which shape the gesture takes and how gesture shapes evolve through time. We focus on a particular model based on theoretical frameworks on metaphors and embodied cognition that argue that people can represent, reason about and convey abstract concepts using physical representations and processes, which can be conveyed through physical gestures.