Maria Staudte

Maria Staudte has been head of the Independent Research Group Embodied Spoken Interaction within the Cluster of Excellence since August 2012.

Short CV

Before Maria started the independent research group at the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction, she was a postdoc within the Cluster at the Saarland University and a visiting researcher at SUNY Stony Brook University from 2012-2013. 

Her group aims to investigate the interplay of language and non-verbal cues in spoken face-to-face interaction by following an integrated approach that unites psycholinguistic methods and research questions with the aim to design human-like agents and dialog systems. One key question is, for instance, how non-linguistic cues, such as referential gaze and gestures, mediate (visual) attention and influence the on-line mapping between language and the visual environment. To investigate these issues, her group exploits interaction scenarios involving both people and artificial agents or language generation systems. Such systems have the benefit of being fully controllable confederates for which erroneous or odd behavior can be acceptable, such that a broader range of manipulations and phenomena can be conducted and investigated. Simultaneously, the results from ongoing projects directly contribute to the improvement of systems used for human-computer interaction, for instance in making instructions in virtual and real environments more efficient, or in making virtual agents more human-like and the interaction with them more natural.  

 

Research interests

Maria's research interests center around situated and multimodal communication, i.e., how individuals interact in a shared environment by means of various information channels such as language, gaze and gesture. Specifically, she seeks to find out which information gaze and referential gestures may convey and how this affects speech production and comprehension. One important question is, for instance, how such non-linguistic cues mediate (visual) attention and influence the on-line mapping between language and the visual environment.
 

Contact

Maria Staudte

Maria Staudte

Saarland University
Cluster of Excellence
Multimodal Computing and Interaction

Campus C74, Room 2.05
66123, Saarbrücken
Germany

Fon: +49 681 302 6552
E-Mail
Website

Publications

Affiliation

Computer Linguistics Department, Saarland University Saarland University Cluster of Excellence