Dynamicline
In contrast, there can be some events or situations in which one’s general tendencies change, and one gestures in a greatly different way. For example a person that never makes hand/arm gestures while talking may change their behavior if they are very angry at someone. This is why it is not enough to build ECAs which have only general behavior tendencies. The agent’s general behavior tendencies should be modulated by other factors.
the concept of Dynamicline embodies the concept of agent’s local behavior tendencies.
The Dynamicline is a set of parameters that derives both from the agent’s Baseline and current communicative intention. Both Baseline and Dynamicline are defined on the same set of parameters but the concepts is different, because the Baseline is a static global parameter while the Dynamicline is a dynamically changing element. They can be modeled in exactly the same way.
The Dynamicline is computed from the Baseline at runtime. This process is executed by the Behavior Quality Computation (BQC) module. The input of the system is the agent’s Baseline, which is a constant, and its current communicative intention. Each time the communicative intention varies the BQC module computes a new Dynamicline for the agent.
The computation of the agent’s Dynamicline consists in “applying” some behavior qualifiers to the agent’s Baseline. These behavior qualifiers allow us to define mathematical operations (Addition - ADD, subtraction - SUB, multiplication - MULT, division, scaling ) to be performed over the parameters contained in the agent’s Baseline each time a certain intention must be communicated.
The Dynamicline XML file is stored in the folder <GRETA_DIR>/bin/BehaviorPlanner/Qualifier/. In the file can be added the matematical operations to perform over the parameters for a specific intention.
Below an example of behavior qualifier for an intention:
When this intention (belief-relation-enumerate) is performed, the repetition parameter (REP) is set to 1 and the gesture, head, gaze, face and torso signals will be repeted more times.
The behavior qualifier below allow to ADD a value of 100 to the exixting baseline SPC value but just for the gesture signals in that intention (certainty-certain)
In the character .ini files (<GRETA_DIR>/bin/Common/Data/characters/) can be possible the qualifier file to consider for the dinamicline. In these file should be the attribute QUALIFIER. If the QUALIFIER isn't in the character specific ini file, it will be in default.ini file. So for all the characters is take the default qualifier.
But if you want to specify a different qualifier you can add the attribute QUALIFIER to the character .ini file and assign to it the qualifier the file path, like in the example below
QUALIFIER=./BehaviorPlanner/Qualifier/qualifier_camille
Remember that when you modify the qualifier file or the ini files, to actually see the modification in the performing intention you must close and restart the application.
- M. Mancini and C. Pelachaud, Dynamic behavior qualifiers for conversational agents, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 17-19 September 2007, Paris, France