Presenting through performing:: on the use of multiple lifelike characters in knowledge-based presentation systems

Trying to imitate the skills of human presenters, some R&D projects have begun to deploy animated characters in presentation tasks. Based either on cartoon drawings, recorded video images of persons, or 3D body models, presentation agents enrich the repertoire of available presentation styles which can be used to effectively communicate information to the user. In this paper, we investigate a new style for presenting information. We introduce the notion of presentation teams which - rather than addressing the user directly - convey information in the style of performances to be observed by him or her. The paper presents an approach to the automated generation of performances which has been tested in two different application scenarios: car sales dialogues and soccer commentary. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.