A Dialogue Model for Collaborative Storytelling with Children

Abstract

Storytelling is both an entertaining and an educational activity for children. It allows them to express their thoughts about the world around them, while learning about language, values and interacting with others. Thus, storytelling is utilized not only at home but also in the school environment to engage children in sharing information about things that interest them and their everyday life experiences. Conversational agents or chatbots are becoming popular as a form of human-computer interaction. They can engage with their human users in dialogue using natural language to answer queries. In this paper, we describe the design of our dialogue model to enable a conversational agent to act as a collaborative storytelling peer, encouraging children to share their stories through pumps and hints.