TY  - JOUR
A1  - Garoufi, Konstantina
A1  - Staudte, Maria
A1  - Koller, Alexander
A1  - Crocker, Matthew W.
T1  - Exploiting Listener Gaze to Improve Situated Communication in Dynamic Virtual Environments
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2  - Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer-generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real-time index of understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per-utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze insituated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi-modal models of situated interaction.
KW  - Listener gaze
KW  - Eye-tracking
KW  - Referential understanding
KW  - Virtual environments
KW  - Situated communication
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12298
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 40
SP  - 1671
EP  - 1703
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -