Interruptions in Human-Agent Interaction

Turn management is one of the necessary social interactions skills. In human-human interactions, turn changes are naturally completed by interruption, "cooperatively"or "competitively". Interruptions are inherent in conversation. They can be considered disruptive at first glance, but can also be cooperative and participate to enriching the interaction. To create natural human-agent interaction, Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) should be able to communicate autonomously with humans both verbally and nonverbally. A challenge is then to handle interruptions during their interaction. This article presents our ongoing work to endow ECA to manage interruption during the interaction with a human partner. In order to achieve this goal, we start by analyzing human-human interaction data.