I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Sociable Agents Group of the Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology" (CITEC) at Bielefeld University. I am working as a research associate in the Collaborative Research Center 673 "Alignment in Communication".

Research Interests
The use of speech-accompanying iconic gestures is a ubiquitous characteristic of human-human communication, especially when spatial information is expressed. It is therefore desirable to endow virtual agents with similar gestural expressiveness and flexibility to improve the interaction between humans and machines. My objective is to devise and probe computational simulation models based on the results of empirical studies to increase the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this intuitive form of human communication.

SFB 673, Project B1 "Speech-Gesture Alignment"

Sommersemester 2008
Journal Club "Cognition in Communication" (Webseite, ekVV, Stud-IP)

Sommersemester 2007
Seminar "Multiagentensysteme" (Webseite, ekVV)

MOG 2010   
3rd Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, July 6, 2010

GW 2009
8th International Gesture Workshop 
Bielefeld University, Germany, February 25-27, 2009      

Bergmann, K., Kopp, S., & Eyssel, F. (2010). Individualized Gesturing Outperforms Average Gesturing–Evaluating Gesture Production in Virtual Humans. In J. Allbeck et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (LNAI 6356, pp. 104–117). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. [preprint]

van der Sluis, I., Bergmann, K., van Hooijdonk, C., & Theune, M. (2010), Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2010). CTIT Workshop Proceedings WP 2010-02. [pdf]

Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2010). Modelling the Production of Co-Verbal Iconic Gestures by Learning Bayesian Decision Networks. In Applied Artificial Intelligence 24(6):530–551. [preprint]

Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2010). Modelling and Evaluation of Lexical and Syntactic Alignment with a Priming-based Microplanner. In E. Krahmer & M. Theune (Eds.), Empirical methods in natural language generation. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.

Lücking, A., Bergmann, K., Hahn, F., Kopp, S., & Rieser, H. (2010). The Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment Corpus (SaGA). In M. Kipp, J.-C. Martin, P. Paggio & D. Heylen (Eds.), LREC 2010 Workshop: Multimodal Corpora–Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality. [pdf]

Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2010). Adaptive expressiveness–Virtual Conversational Agents that can Align to their Interaction Partner. In W. van der Hoek, G.A. Kaminka, Y. Lespérance, M. Luck and S. Sen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), pages 91–98. [pdf]

Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2010). Systematicity and Idiosyncrasy in Iconic Gesture Use: Empirical Analysis and Computational Modeling. In S. Kopp & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction (LNAI 5934, pp. 182-194). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. [preprint]

Kopp, S., Bergmann, K., Buschmeier, H. & Sadeghipour, A. (2009). Requirements and Building Blocks for Sociable Embodied Agents. In B. Mertsching et al. (Eds.), KI 2009: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI 5803, pp. 508-515). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. [preprint]

Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2009). GNetIc–Using Bayesian Decision Networks for Iconic Gesture Generation. In Z. Ruttkay et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (LNAI 5773, pp. 76–89). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. [preprint]
Nominated for Best Paper Award

Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., and Kopp, S. (2009). An alignment-capable microplanner for natural language generation. In E. Krahmer & M. Theune (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (pp. 82–89), Athens, Greece. [pdf]

Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2009). Increasing expressiveness for virtual agents–Autonomous generation of speech and gesture for spatial description tasks. In K. Decker, J. Sichman, C. Sierra, and C. Castelfranchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009), pages 361–368. [pdf]
Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award

Kopp, S., Bergmann, K. & Wachsmuth, I. (2008). Multimodal communication from multimodal thinking - towards an integrated model of speech and gesture production. Semantic Computing 2(1):115–136. [pdf]

Bergmann, K. & Kopp, S. (2008). Multimodal content representation for speech and gesture production. In M. Theune, I. van der Sluis, Y. Bachvarova and E. André (Eds.), Symposium at the AISB Annual Convention: Multimodal Output Generation (pp. 61–68). Aberdeen, UK. [pdf]

Kopp, S. & Bergmann, K. (2007). Towards an architecture for aligned speech and gesture production. In C. Pelachaud, J. Martin, E. André, G. Chollet, K. Karpouzis, & D. Pelé (Eds.), Proceedings of 7th Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (LNAI 4722, pp. 389–390). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.

Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2007). Co-expressivity of speech and gesture: Lessons for models of aligned speech and gesture production. In P. Olivier & C. Kray (Eds.), Symposium at the AISB Annual Convention: Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters (pp. 153–158). Newcastle, UK.  [pdf]

Bergmann, K. & Kopp, S. (2006). Verbal or visual? How information is distributed across speech and gesture in spatial dialog. In David Schlangen and Raquel Fernandez (Eds.): Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 90–97), Potsdam: Universitätsverlag. [pdf]

On the production and perception of iconic gestures: Insights from computational modelling and empirical studies. Presentation at the 10th Biannual Meeting of the German Society for Cognitive Science. Potsdam, Germany, October 3-6, 2010.

Individualized Gesturing Outperforms Average Gesturing-Evaluating Gesture Production in Virtual Humans. Paper presentation at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '10). Philadelphia, PA, USA, September 20-22, 2010.

What Shapes Inconic Gestures? Insights from Computational Modelling. Presentation at the 4th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS). European University Viadrina Franfurt/Oder, Germany, July 25-30, 2010.

The Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment (SaGA) corpus. Invited presentation at the CLARIN and FLaReNet Workshop on "Best practices for speech and multimodal databases". KTH Stockholm, Sweden, November 25-26, 2009.

GNetIc—Using Bayesian Decision Networks for Iconic Gesture Generation. Paper presentation at the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '09). Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 14-16, 2009.

Increasing Expressiveness for Virtual Agents—Autonomous Generation of Speech and Gesture in Spatial Description Tasks. Paper presentation at the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '09). Budapest, Hungary, May 10-15, 2009.

Systematicity and Idiosyncrasy in Iconic Gestures—A Probabilistic Model of Gesture Use.  Presentation at the 8th International Gesture Workshop 2009—Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction. Bielefeld University, Germany, February 25-27, 2009.

Multimodal Content Representation for Speech and Gesture Production. Presentation at the Symposium at the AISB Annual Convention: Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2008), University of Aberdeen, UK, April 3-4, 2008.

Empirical Study: Representation Techniques in Gesture Use. Poster presentation at the AISB Annual Convention, University of Aberdeen, UK, April 1-4, 2008.

Speech-Gesture Alignment. Project Panel in collaboration with S. Kopp, A. Lücking, H. Rieser and I. Wachsmuth at the 3rd Congress of the ISGS on "Integrating Gestures", Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, June 18-21, 2007.

Computational Modeling of Coexpressivity between Speech and Gesture. Presentation at the Workshop on "Visual Prosody in Language Communication", Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, May 10-11, 2007.

Computational Modeling of Speech and Gesture Alignment. Poster presentation at the Interdisciplinary College 2007 (IK 2007), Günne at lake Möhne, March 9-16, 2007.

Verbal or visual? How Information is Distributed Across Speech and Gesture in Spatial Dialog. Paper presentation at the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (brandial 2006), University of Potsdam, Germany, September 11-13, 2006.

Koexpressivität von Sprache und Gestik in Wegbeschreibungen. Presentation at the 16th Student Conference of Computational Linguistics (TaCoS 2006), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, June 8-11, 2006.