L’importance des compétences en prise de parole en public (PPP) stimule le développement de systèmes d’évaluation automatisée, mais l’intégration des grandes modèles de langue (LLMs) reste peu explorée. Nous proposons un cadre où les LLMs évaluent des critères issus de la littérature et de retours de formateurs. Nous testons trois approches : des prédictions LLM directes à zéro coup (RMSE 0, 8) par rapport à des prédictions de persuasion basées sur des caractéristiques lexicales fabriquées à la main (RMSE 0, 51) ou basées sur des critères évalués par LLM 0, 6 insérés en entrée dans ElasticNet. L’analyse des liens entre critères et caractéristiques lexicales montre que seul le critère de niveau de langue évalué par LLM est prévisible (score F1 de 0, 56) soulignant les limites actuelles des LLMs pour l’analyse de la PPP. Code source et données disponibles sur GitHub.

Human verbal communication includes affective messages which are conveyed through use of emotionally colored words. There has been a lot of research effort in this direction but the problem of integrating state-of-the-art neural language models with affective information remains an area ripe for exploration. In this paper, we propose an extension to an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) language model for generation of conversational text, conditioned on affect categories. Our proposed model, Affect-LM enables us to customize the degree of emotional content in generated sentences through an additional design parameter. Perception studies conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that Affect-LM can generate naturally looking emotional sentences without sacrificing grammatical correctness. Affect-LM also learns affect-discriminative word representations, and perplexity experiments show that additional affective information in conversational text can improve language model prediction.

The ability to efficiently speak in public is an essential asset for many professions and is used in everyday life. As such, tools enabling the improvement of public speaking performance and the assessment and mitigation of anxiety related to public speaking would be very useful. Multimodal interaction technologies, such as computer vision and embodied conversational agents, have recently been investigated for the training and assessment of interpersonal skills. Once central requirement for these technologies is multimodal corpora for training machine learning models. This paper addresses the need of these technologies by presenting and sharing a multimodal corpus of public speaking presentations. These presentations were collected in an experimental study investigating the potential of interactive virtual audiences for public speaking training. This corpus includes audio-visual data and automatically extracted features, measures of public speaking anxiety and personality, annotations of participants’ behaviors and expert ratings of behavioral aspects and overall performance of the presenters. We hope this corpus will help other research teams in developing tools for supporting public speaking training.

Interpersonal attitudes are expressed by non-verbal behaviors on a variety of different modalities. The perception of these behaviors is influenced by how they are sequenced with other behaviors from the same person and behaviors from other interactants. In this paper, we present a method for extracting and generating sequences of non-verbal signals expressing interpersonal attitudes. These sequences are used as part of a framework for non-verbal expression with Embodied Conversational Agents that considers different features of non-verbal behavior: global behavior tendencies, interpersonal reactions, sequencing of non-verbal signals, and communicative intentions. Our method uses a sequence mining technique on an annotated multimodal corpus to extract sequences characteristic of different attitudes. New sequences of non-verbal signals are generated using a probabilistic model, and evaluated using the previously mined sequences.