Enculturating Conversational Interfaces by Socio-cultural Aspects of Communication
We are living in a globalized world but local or cultural identities strongly influence our patterns of conversational behaviors and our interpretation of such behaviors of others by estblishing norms and values. Nevertheless, current conversational interfaces seldom reflect such cultural "mental programs" as Hofstede has termed this effect. Thus, users are forced to adapt their way of interaction and interpretation to a given (most of the time western) perspective. Instead it would be much more reasonable to allow e.g. for culturally tailored presentation of information. Although there is no principled approach yet to challenge the importance of cultural patterns in the human-computer interaction, there are a number of promising results from a variety of research projects around the world that have started to integrate cultural aspects in the interaction. These range from artistic work (e.g. ZENetic) over web design to CSCW support tools and training applications with conversational virtual characters (e.g. CUBE-G, Tactical Language Initiative). Bringing together the leading reseachers from these emerging research streams to further intensive discussions will definitely contribute to establishing a new research area in intelligent user interfaces.Organizers:
 | Matthias Rehm, Elisabeth André Multimedia Concepts and Applications University of Augsburg, Germany |
Department of Computer, Information and Communication Sciences
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan
 | Toyoaki Nishida Department of Intelligence Science and Technology Kyoto University, Japan |