The Role of Shared Attention in Human-Computer Conversation

This paper describes our on-going project on human-computer and human-computer-human conversation. We here emphasize the role of 'shared attention' in verbal and non-verbal communications. Shared attention spotlights things and events being mentioned in the conversation and makes the discourse coherent about the same topic. Being inspired by communication disorders in autism, we assume that shared attention plays an indispensable role in naturally interactive and communicative conversation, since its function is observed in infants at pre-verbal stage and its malfunction is observed in infants and children with autism. Focusing especially on 'shared visual attention', that is simply 'looking at the same object', we are developing a computer system that can create and maintain shared visual attention with humans by monitoring their gaze-direction. We are planning experiments on human interaction with this system in order to evaluate and elaborate our model of shared attention in conversation.