TED-Culture: Culturally Inclusive Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Embodied Social Agents

Generating natural and expressive co-speech gestures for conversational virtual agents and social robots remains a persistent challenge, crucial for enhancing their acceptability and usage in real-world contexts. The strong cultural and linguistic influences on co-speech gestures further complicate this issue, highlighting the problem of the limited availability of cross-cultural co-speech gesture datasets. This study introduces a novel dataset, the TED-Culture Dataset, derived from TED talks, focusing on cross-cultural gesture generation based on linguistic cues. By releasing the dataset, we allow for further research on multilingual co-speech gesture generation for embodied conversational agents.