We describe a BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) approach and architecture for a conversational virtual companion embodied as a child’s Toy. Our aim is to support both structured conversation-based activities (e.g., story-telling, collaborative games) as well as more free-flowing, engaging dialogue with variation and some unpredictability. We argue that a goal-oriented approach to the agent’s conv...

Preserving the knowledge of previous generations and passing it to new generations is challenging. This process is usually based on an educational system or in any other kind of face-to-face tradition. However, developing countries usually face a lack of well educated people so that this process is hindered. This is even more problematic for countries having recently struggled through times of ...

Conversational agents are more and more investigated by the community but their ability to keep the user committed in the interaction is limited. Predicting the behavior of children in a human-machine interaction setting is a key issue for the success of narrative conversational agents. In this paper, we investigate solutions to evaluate the child’s commitment in the story and to detect when th...

This article explores queer Japanese women's narratives of their own histories and the history of the "Japanese lesbian community," which has been constructed as a space outside the heterosexual mainstream, a space where queer women can find at least temporary refuge. It begins with the acknowledgment that the evolution and the shape of the community, along with the identities of the women who ...

Young children are notoriously bad story-tellers. Their stories often lack minimal plot structure, rely on crude temporal sequencing, and make little (if any) use of the rich linguistic devices that allow adults to cohesively bind sentences together in a narrative (Berman and Slobin, 1994). The studies reported here investigate one story-telling dimension that children have trouble with: the ma...