Head gestures, gaze and the principles of conversational structure

Much of the work on embodied conversational agents is concerned with building computational models of nonverbal behaviors that can generate the right behavior in the appropriate context. In this paper, we discuss, from a linguistic and conversational theoretic point of view, how nonverbal behaviors in conversation work. We look particularly at gaze and head movements. These play a variety of functions in face-to-face interactions. We show how these functions are structured by general principles governing cooperative actions and symbolic communication.