TY - GEN
T1 - Investigating How Text and Motion Style Shape Directness In Embodied Conversational Agents
AU - O'Mahony, Michael
AU - Ennis, Cathy
AU - Ross, Robert
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/12/2
Y1 - 2025/12/2
N2 - Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are becoming more widely used for various applications, notably in health. Some studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of delivering Motivational Interviews (MIs), a patient-centred behaviour change method, with ECAs. Despite showing promise, the effect of agent communication style on MI effectiveness remains underexplored. Directness has been shown to impact satisfaction and preference of dialogue systems, and effectiveness in some cases. However, outside of verbal style, how to control directness in ECAs to achieve these goals is not well understood. We designed an ECA to convey different levels of directness through language and Non-Verbal behaviours (NVBs), then evaluated the impact of language and NVB on directness with a perception study. The results showed that language influenced perceived directness, and that NVB contributed when aligned with indirect language. These findings suggest ways to shape conversational agents' communication style to enhance their effectiveness.
AB - Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are becoming more widely used for various applications, notably in health. Some studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of delivering Motivational Interviews (MIs), a patient-centred behaviour change method, with ECAs. Despite showing promise, the effect of agent communication style on MI effectiveness remains underexplored. Directness has been shown to impact satisfaction and preference of dialogue systems, and effectiveness in some cases. However, outside of verbal style, how to control directness in ECAs to achieve these goals is not well understood. We designed an ECA to convey different levels of directness through language and Non-Verbal behaviours (NVBs), then evaluated the impact of language and NVB on directness with a perception study. The results showed that language influenced perceived directness, and that NVB contributed when aligned with indirect language. These findings suggest ways to shape conversational agents' communication style to enhance their effectiveness.
KW - Communication Style
KW - Embodied Conversational Agents
KW - Human-Avatar Interaction
KW - Human-Computer Interaction
KW - Motivational Interviewing
KW - Non-Verbal Behaviour
KW - Text Style Control
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105024966717
U2 - 10.1145/3769047.3769067
DO - 10.1145/3769047.3769067
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105024966717
T3 - Proceedings MIG 2025 - 18th ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games
BT - Proceedings MIG 2025 - 18th ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games
A2 - Sumner, Robert W.
A2 - Zund, Fabio
A2 - Jorg, Sophie
A2 - Pelechano, Nuria
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 18th Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, MIG 2025
Y2 - 3 December 2025 through 5 December 2025
ER -