Working Group

Timothy Bickmore (http://www.media.mit.edu/~bickmore/) (MIT Media Lab)

Social relationships are primarily constituted through language, and face-to-face conversation is the primary and universal site of language use, thus the study of the social aspects of face-to-face interaction presents a vitally important area of research on socially intelligent agents. This work lies at the nexus of discourse and linguistics, social psychology, and the technical disciplines required for the development of embodied conversational agents with social intelligence.

• What are the social aspects of language use?
• Why haven't the social aspects of language use been addressed in computational linguistics and dialogue systems? What's hard about it?
• What role does human nonverbal behavior play in social intelligence?
• What constraints do real-time interaction place on socially intelligent systems? What opportunities does it afford?
• How can human-agent relationships be charaterized and modeled?
• What linguistic strategies can be employed by an agent to intentionally modify its relationship with a user?
• What role does affect play in face-to-face interaction, and what does this have to do with social intelligence?
  

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