Enculturating conversational interfaces by socio-cultural aspects of communication

The workshop is centered around three main research challenges: 1.) Computationally viable models of cultural aspects of conversations: Cultural norms and values penetrate all our communications and interactions by giving us heuristics how to behave and how to interpret the verbal and nonverbal behavior of others. To make such a notion like culture available for computation, we need a very specific theory of culture that takes its effects on communication and interaction into account.2.) Reliable empirical data on cultural/cross-cultural interaction: To realize technical systems that take cultural influences on behavior into account, precise data analysis on how this influence manifests itself is necessary. In the literature, this information is often given in very general forms without to the precise data on which the observations are based.3.) Enculturating conversational interfaces: Having identified cultural influences on verbal/nonverbal communicative behaviors, it remains to be shown how this can be applied to the development of human-computer interfaces, for instance in an interface reflecting cultural norms and values of communication.