Case-based teaching systems, like good human teachers, tell stories in order to help students learn. A case-based teaching system engages a student in a challenging task and monitors his actions looking for opportunities to tell stories that will assist the learning process. In order to produce stories at the appropriate moment, a casebased teaching system must have a library of stories that ar...

In this paper, we describe our findings from research designed to explore the effect of virtual human counselors' self-disclosure using intimate human back stories on real human clients' social responses in psychological counseling sessions. To investigate this subject, we designed an experiment involving two conditions of the counselors' self-disclosure: human back stories and computer back st...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate a media intervention designed to improve one newspaper's portrayal of mental illnesses, specifically, schizophrenia. The project was part of an international antistigma program, Open the Doors, organized by the World Psychiatric Association. METHODS The media intervention attempted to influence news content directly by providing reporters with more accurate background in...

Previous research has shown that information that is repeated is more likely to be rated as true than information that has not been heard before. The current experiment examines whether familiarity with false news stories would increase rates of truthfulness and plausibility for these events. Further, the experiment tested whether false stories that were familiar would result in the creation of...

Stories are pervasive in conversation between people [5]. They are used to establish identity pass on cultural heritage, and build rapport. Often stories are swapped when one conversational participant will reply to a story with a story. Stories are also told by virtual humans [1, 6, 2]. In creating or mining stories for a virtual human (VH) to tell, there are a number of considerations that co...

Mothers from two middle-class contexts from Berlin, Germany (n = 35), and Delhi, India (n = 28) told a baby story to their 3-year olds about an event that had happened during the children's first year of life. The contexts represented two cultural models: the model of psychological autonomy (Berlin) and the model of autonomy-relatedness (Delhi). We investigated the culture-specific functions of...

week about AI, or any other topic, requires more than searching for individual terms. Since it is time-consuming to find and post interesting stories manually, we have designed and written an AI program called NewsFinder1 that automatically collects English-language news stories from the web, categorizes them with trained models, filters out uninteresting and unrelated stories based on a set of...

The new social media sites — blogs, wikis, Flickr and Digg, among others — underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. Digg is a social news aggregator which allows users to submit links to, vote on and discuss news stories. Each day Digg selects a handful of stories to feature on its front pag...

We have developed an approach to identification and tracking of currently unfolding news stories extracted from the news articles published on the Web. Our approach employs a set of agents to retrieve those articles from the Web that might refer to some developing news story. The set of agents is inspired by social insects, in particular by a bee colony. Bees identify popular terms, referred to...

Although in some sense narrative approaches in practical theology have been developed only recently, one could claim that there is a long and intrinsic history of their relationship. Religious practices that form the core material for theological reflection in practical theology are often directly related to narratives. In one way or another human stories are connected with stories of and about...