Real-Time Assessment of Student State

In this proposal we describe a research and development effort that will support the representation of coordinated verbal and nonverbal behaviors in synthetic characters. The ultimate goal of this effort is to allow a user to populate a virtual environment with characters that exhibit believable communicative competence. In this way, we will make computerized language training more engaging and more effective. The effort we describe will revolve around two technical objectives. The first will be to design and build a software interface that allows courseware developers to specify a character's communicative intent and the relevant contextual attributes that underlie dialog in the synthetic environment. The second will be to develop the software architecture that allows the courseware developer's specifications to be realized as the appropriate character animations in the virtual environment at run time. We will satisfy both these technical objectives with the development of a Believable Communicative Behavior Middleware.xxx