Stances 2012 - International Workshop on Exploring Stances in Interactions: Conceptual and Practical Issues in Social Signal Processing Research

Stances are multimodal and can be seen as expressions of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or evaluations. The ability to understand stances during interactions is an important aspect of human social intelligence. The recognition of a user's stances during human-computer interaction will enable an embodied conversational agent (ECA) to identify how the user's message is to be perceived and understood, and consequently, how the interaction can be adapted to this interpretation. The synthesis of an ECA's stances improves the interaction in terms of, for example, the ECA's believability and the atmosphere of the interaction. Hence, this workshop concentrates on studies of multimodal expressions of stances in both human-human and human-machine interaction, and on the automatic processing of stances. We aim to bring together researchers from various disciplines (e.g., phonetics, linguistics, psychology, computer science) to foster multidisciplinary discussions on stances in interaction.