Becker, C., Kopp, S., & Wachsmuth, I. (2007). Why emotions should be integrated into conversational agents. In Toyoaki Nishida (Ed.), Conversational Informatics: An Engineering Approach (pp. 49-68). Wiley.
When building conversational agents that are to take part in social
interaction with humans,
an important question is whether psychological concepts like emotions
or personality of the
agents need to be incorporated. In this chapter we argue for the integration
of an emotion system
into a conversational agent to enable the simulation of having “own
emotions”. We first
clarify the concept of emotions and we discuss different approaches
to modeling emotions
and personality in artificial systems. Drawing on our work on the
multimodal conversational
agent Max, we present motives for the integration of emotions as integral
parts of an agent’s
cognitive architecture. Our approach combines different psychological
emotion theories and
distinguishes between primary and secondary emotions as originating
from different levels
of this architecture. Exemplary application scenarios are described
to show how the agent’s
believability can be increased by the integration of emotions. In
a cooperative setting, Max
is employed as a virtual interactive guide in a public computer museum,
where his emotion
module enhances his acceptance as a coequal conversational partner.
We further quote an
empirical study that yields evidence that the same emotion module
supports the believability
and lifelikeness of the agent in a competitive gaming scenario.