How culture and social relationship affect performing and perceiving of postures

With the goal of designing culturally appropriate conversational agents, this study (1) collects comparative German and Japanese corpus, namely CUBE-G corpus, (2) by analyzing the corpus, investigates how nonverbal behaviors are different depending on the culture and the social relationship, then, (3) conducts a perception study to examine whether people prefer agent's behaviors which are consistent with their own culture and matched with a conversation context in a given social relationship. As the result, we found some aspects that characterize preferable postures, and results of perception study showed that, Japanese participants preferred behavioral aspects that are in-line with their own culture under a specified social relationship. This suggests that empirical study of comparative multicultural corpus is useful in determining appropriate nonverbal behaviors in culturally adaptive virtual agents.