Appropriate Dialogue Coordination for Sociable Agents

In natural face-to-face dialogue, intersubjective coordinations occur selectively, both on small and longer time scales. We devise a multi-level approach, in which both automatic alignment and more strategic processes (e.g., audience design, social practices) occur on different, yet continuously interacting levels and are modulated by notions of familiarity and companionship. For the case of embodied feedback, we model and evaluate these processes in a dialogue system whose architecture emphasises incremental processing of multimodal input and output.