Storytelling can be used by conversational agents in a wide variety of domains to maintain user engagement, both within a single interaction and over dozens or hundreds of interactions over time. The majority of agents designed with this ability to date deliver their stories as monologues without user input. However, people rarely tell stories in conversations this way, and instead rely on list...

Because many world folk stories describe wife abuse with remarkable insight, these stories are useful in addressing the sensitive issues that arise when counseling battered women. Following the views of Milton Erickson and Joan Laird about the importance of stories as a therapeutic tool, techniques were developed in a regional Coalition for Battered Women in North Carolina to use folk stories a...

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...

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...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Local television news commonly reports on health. This study aimed to characterize local TV news stroke reporting in America. METHODS Content analysis of stroke stories reported on 122 US local television stations. All stroke stories were coded for main focus and discussion of risk factors, stroke signs and symptoms, recombinant tissue plasminogen activator, treatment w...

Through user testing of Storytelling Alice, we found that users’ ability to find and develop story ideas was important in maintaining their engagement with programming in the system. In this paper, we describe the design process behind creating a gallery of characters and scenery that helps Storytelling Alice users to find and develop story ideas as well as lessons learned about successful and ...