Context-Aware Automated Analysis and Annotation of Social Human-Agent Interactions

The outcome of interpersonal interactions depends not only on the contents that we communicate verbally, but also on nonverbal social signals. Because a lack of social skills is a common problem for a significant number of people, serious games and other training environments have recently become the focus of research. In this work, we present NovA (Nonverbal behavior Analyzer), a system that analyzes and facilitates the interpretation of social signals automatically in a bidirectional interaction with a conversational agent. It records data of interactions, detects relevant social cues, and creates descriptive statistics for the recorded data with respect to the agent's behavior and the context of the situation. This enhances the possibilities for researchers to automatically label corpora of human-agent interactions and to give users feedback on strengths and weaknesses of their social behavior.