Starting a Conversation with Strangers in Virtual Reykjavik: Explicit Announcement of Presence

Virtual Reykjavik is an Icelandic language and culture training application for foreigners learning Icelandic. In this video game-like environment, the user is asked to solve given tasks in the game and in order to complete them he/she must interact with the characters, e.g. by conversing with them on contextspecific topics. To make this a reality, a model for how natural conversations start in a specific situations has been developed, based on data from that same situation in real life: a stranger asking another stranger for directions to a particular place in downtown Reykjavik. This involved defining a multimodal annotation scheme, outlining the communicative functions and behaviors associated with them. However, current annotation schemes lacked the appropriate function for this specific case, which lead us to finding and proposing an appropriate communicative function – the Explicit Announcement of Presence. A study was conducted to explore and better understand how conversation is initiated in first encounters between people who do not know each other. Human-to-human conversations were analyzed for the purpose of modelling a realistic conversation between human users and virtual agents. Results from the study have lead to the inclusion of the communicative function in the human-to-agent conversation system. By playing the game the learners will be exposed to situations that they may encounter in real life, and therefore the interaction is based on real life data, rather than textbook examples. We believe that this application will help bridge the gap from the class room to the real world, preparing learners to initiate conversations with real Icelandic speakers.