Abstract

Because human-produced language is often still considered the golden standard in the natural language generation field, many virtual humans (VHs) used in communication-skills training simulations continue to be accompanied by human-authored dialogue instead of computer-generated dialogue. The human author used for writing such dialogue, however, has yet to be investigated. Dialogue authors can have a variety of identities - gender, culture, profession, etc. - which may or may not have an effect on the VH dialogue they produce. An identity incongruency between an author and the VH itself could have unexpected effects on VH interviewers' interactions. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the effect of an author's identity on VH dialogue produced in the context of a virtual patient (VP) interview. We evaluated writing samples from speech-language pathology (SLP) students and Chinese and Chinese Americans when creating a Chinese VP suffering from trouble swallowing. We also conducted a user study in which SLP students interviewed VPs created with dialogue from these different author identities. Our results indicate that there are some content differences in the dialogue produced by different author identities and that VH interviewers are able to recognize these differences.