Toward Automated Generation of Affective Gestures from Text:A Theory-Driven Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a theory-driven method for generating robot gestures from text and sentiment analysis, enabling more expressive and contextually appropriate non-verbal communication in human-robot interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that combines semantic and affective information to generate speech-paired gestures, advancing beyond rule-based and purely data-driven methods.

Findings

Successfully generates gestures with controllable shape, intensity, and speed.

Integrates semantic and affective cues for more natural gestures.

Enhances human-robot communication expressiveness.

Abstract

Communication in both human-human and human-robot interac-tion (HRI) contexts consists of verbal (speech-based) and non-verbal(facial expressions, eye gaze, gesture, body pose, etc.) components.The verbal component contains semantic and affective information;accordingly, HRI work on the gesture component so far has focusedon rule-based (mapping words to gestures) and data-driven (deep-learning) approaches to generating speech-paired gestures basedon either semantics or the affective state. Consequently, most ges-ture systems are confined to producing either semantically-linkedor affect-based gesticures. This paper introduces an approach forenabling human-robot communication based on a theory-drivenapproach to generate speech-paired robot gestures using both se-mantic and affective information. Our model takes as input textand sentiment analysis, and generates robot gestures in terms oftheir shape, intensity, and speed.