Producing semantically appropriate gestures in embodied language generation
Obed E. Torres · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1998
In this thesis, I address the problem of producing semantically appropriate gestures in embodied language generation. Most of the previous work on gesture in interactive systems has focused on gestural languages independent of speech content. Research on embodied language generation has directed attention to the generation of spontaneous gestures that accompany speech in face-to-face interactions. Implemented systems for embodied language generation are able to test the placement and realization of gestural phenomena in relation to intonation and information struc-ture. However, important aspects of the problem have not been fully addressed such as generating gestural forms from semantic information and deciding what semantic information should be con-veyed across speech and gesture modalities. I extend, in two ways, an existing body of work on the rule-based generation of semantically appropriate gestures. First, by proposing hypotheses about the distribution of semantic information across the speech and gesture modalities and the realization of semantic information in gestural forms. Second, by building a prototype that serves as a vehicle for the exploration of some of the proposed hypotheses and experimentation with the