In general, the more a robot or 3D animation looks and acts like a human, the more people will react positively to it. However, there is a point on the scale of similarity, at 'almost human', where people's reactions dip dramatically, before recovering higher up the scale. This dip is called the uncanny valley, and constitutes a problem for productive human-robot interaction.
Many viewers of the animated film The Polar Express found the lifelike characters to be 'creepy', especially because of their 'dead eyes'. In his ACL president's speech in 2007, Mark Steedman mentioned the implications of this for language technology.
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