Page 110 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 11

EGOCHAT AGENT

A Talking Virtualized Agent that Supports Community
Knowledge Creation

Hidekazu Kubota and Toyoaki Nishida
The University of Tokyo, Faculty of Engineering

Abstract This paper proposes a method that supports knowledge creation in a commu-
nity by mean of talking virtualized-egos. A virtualized-ego is a conversational
agent that represents a community member. Community members can exchange
their knowledge by talking with virtualized-egos even when some members are
away because the virtualized-egos replay appropriate past messages posted by
the absent members. Moreover, messages of virtualized-egos are ordered as a
story. A story is a series of comments that reflects relationships between commu-
nity members. We have developed a system called EgoChat to investigate these
ideas and carried out an experiment to ascertain its effectiveness for community
knowledge creation.

1. Introduction

In the human community, intelligent agents can facilitate community activ-
ities by interacting with humans. Such social agents have been studied in the
research area called Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) [2]. This paper presents a
social agent that tells autobiographical stories on behalf of a community mem-
ber and supports community knowledge creation. Among the human processes
involved in knowledge creation, informal communication aimed at relating
personal experiences results in the creation of innovative knowledge [7]. In
the same way, interaction among humans and agents can also be enriched by
personal experiences. Telling autobiographical stories about oneself promotes
social understanding between humans and agents, thus improving relationships
between them [3]. The great challenge in SIA research that we address in this
paper is how to generate autobiographical conversations from our daily e-mails.
Because the recent progress in communication technologies on electronic me-
dia such as e-mail or the WWW has made participating in a community much