Abstract
In this paper we present the design, development and initial evaluation of a virtual peer that models ethnicity through culturally authentic verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The behaviors chosen for the implementation come from an ethnographic study with African-American and Caucasian children and the evaluation of the virtual peer consists of a study in which children interacted with an African American or a Caucasian virtual peer and then assessed its ethnicity. Results suggest that it may be possible to tip the ethnicity of a embodied conversational agent by changing verbal and non-verbal behaviors instead of surface attributes, and that children engage with those virtual peers in ways that have promise for educational applications.
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Iacobelli, F., Cassell, J. (2007). Ethnic Identity and Engagement in Embodied Conversational Agents. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, JC., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4722. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74997-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74997-4_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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