Spontaneous storytelling is an important part of children's cognitive and linguistic development. And developmental gains are magnified if storytelling is carried out collaboratively with peers. An interactive system that engages children in collaborative narrative might be able to have a similarly positive effect on children's development. However, due to the spontaneous nature of improvisational play among children, the problem is a challenging one from both a technical and a behavioral standpoint: children exchange turns spontaneously, criticize, correct, and interrupt one another, and produce unpredictable responses.

However, as this talk will describe, children's collaborative behaviors during storytelling can be categorized in terms of the roles of the two collaborators, the speech acts they produce, and their non-verbal turn-taking behaviors. A model of these behaviors can be used as the basis for an implementation of an interactive storytelling peer where keyword spotting, natural language processing with commonsense reasoning, and nonverbal cues to floor management are critical to realizing a real-time collaborative interaction between children and an graphical embodied conversational agent. And my current research is demonstrating that children's interactions with virtual peers such as these leads to improvement in discourse skills of the kind that predict later literacy.

This talk is based on collaborative research with former grad student Austin Wang, and will be geared towards a broad audience: linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, communication studies researchers, and those who think making real children play with virtual children is truly evil and want a chance to say so.

Justine Cassell is a professor of Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University, and the director of the Technology and Social Behavior track of the new grad program in Media, Technology and Society. Before coming to Northwestern, Cassell spent 9 years at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. In 2001, Cassell was awarded the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT. Cassell holds undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth and in Lettres Modernes from the Universite de Besançon (France). She holds a M.Phil in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Linguistics and Psychology. Before going to MIT, she was National Science Foundation Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science, and Fellow of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, at the University of Pennsylvania.