Towards a model of face-to-face grounding

We investigate the verbal and nonverbal means for grounding, and propose a design for embodied conversational agents that relies on both kinds of signals to establish common ground in human-computer interaction. We analyzed eye gaze, head nods and attentional focus in the context of a direction-giving task. The distribution of nonverbal behaviors differed depending on the type of dialogue move being grounded, and the overall pattern reflected a monitoring of lack of negative feedback. Based on these results, we present an ECA that uses verbal and nonverbal grounding acts to update dialogue state.