Achieving homophily, or association based on similarity, between a human user and a robot holds a promise of improved perception and task performance. However, no previous studies that address homophily via ethnic similarity with robots exist. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties of evoking ethnic cues in a robot, as opposed to a virtual agent, and an approach to overcome those difficulties based on using ethnically salient behaviors. We outline our methodology for selecting and evaluating such behaviors, and culminate with a study that evaluates our hypotheses of the possibility of ethnic attribution of a robot character through verbal and nonverbal behaviors and of achieving the homophily effect.
The importance of context has motivated several efforts to collect and analyze corpora of context-specific interactions. Iacobelli and Cassell, for example, coded the verbal and nonverbal behaviors, such as gaze, of African American children during spontaneous play @cite_3 . CUBE-G project collected a cross-cultural multimodal corpus of dyadic interactions @cite_12 .
@cite_12 @cite_3
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Trying to adapt the behavior of an interactive system to the cultural background of the user requires information on how relevant behaviors differ as a function of the user's cultural background. To gain such insights in the interrelation of culture and behavior patterns, the information from the literature is often too anecdotal to serve as the basis for modeling a system's behavior, making it necessary to collect multimodal corpora in a standardized fashion in different cultures. In this chapter, the challenges of such an endeavor are introduced and solutions are presented by examples from a German-Japanese project that aims at modeling culture-specific behaviors for Embodied Conversational Agents. In this paper we present the design, development and initial evaluation of a virtual peer that models ethnicity through culturally authentic verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The behaviors chosen for the implementation come from an ethnographic study with African-American and Caucasian children and the evaluation of the virtual peer consists of a study in which children interacted with an African American or a Caucasian virtual peer and then assessed its ethnicity. Results suggest that it may be possible to tip the ethnicity of a embodied conversational agent by changing verbal and non-verbal behaviors instead of surface attributes, and that children engage with those virtual peers in ways that have promise for educational applications.