Skip to main content

A Conversational Robot for Children’s Access to a Cultural Heritage Multimedia Archive

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024)

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a conversational robot designed to assist children in searching a museum’s cultural heritage video archive. The robot employs a form of Spoken Conversational Search to facilitate the clarification of children’s interest (their information need) in specific videos from the archive. Children are typically insufficiently supported in this process by common search technologies such as search-bar and keyboard, or one-shot voice interfaces. We present our approach, which leverages a knowledge-graph representation of the museum’s video archive to facilitate conversational search interactions and suggest content based on the interaction, in order to study information-seeking conversations with children. We plan to use the robot test-bed to investigate the effectiveness of conversational designs over one-shot voice interactions for clarifying children’s information needs in a museum context.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Al Moubayed, S., Beskow, J., Skantze, G., Granström, B.: Furhat: a back-projected human-like robot head for multiparty human-machine interaction. In: Esposito, A., Esposito, A.M., Vinciarelli, A., Hoffmann, R., Müller, V.C. (eds.) Cognitive Behavioural Systems. LNCS, vol. 7403, pp. 114–130. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34584-5_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Andre, L., Durksen, T., Volman, M.L.: Museums as avenues of learning for children: a decade of research. Learn. Environ. Res. 20(1), 47–76 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. European Commission: Directorate-General for Education, Youth, S., Culture: European framework for action on cultural heritage. Publications Office (2019). https://doi.org/10.2766/949707

  4. Grootendorst, M.: KeyBERT: minimal keyword extraction with BERT (2020). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4461265

  5. Hutchinson, H., Druin, A., Bederson, B.B., Reuter, K., Rose, A., Weeks, A.C.: How do I find blue books about dogs? The errors and frustrations of young digital library users. In: Proceedings of HCII 2005, pp. 22–27. Citeseer (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. de Jong, R., Theune, M.: Going Dutch: creating simpleNLG-NL. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 73–78 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Kathania, H.K., Kadiri, S.R., Alku, P., Kurimo, M.: A formant modification method for improved ASR of children’s speech. Speech Commun. 136, 98–106 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Lison, P., Kennington, C.: Who’s in charge? Roles and responsibilities of decision-making components in conversational robots. In: HRI 2023 workshop Human-Robot Conversational Interaction (2023). https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2303.08470, https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08470

  9. Lovato, S.B., Piper, A.M., Wartella, E.A.: Hey Google, do unicorns exist? Conversational agents as a path to answers to children’s questions. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 301–313. IDC 2019. Association for Computing Machinery, Boise, ID, USA (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3323150

  10. Machidon, O.M., Tavčar, A., Gams, M., Duguleană, M.: CulturalERICA: a conversational agent improving the exploration of European cultural heritage. J. Cultural Heritage 41, 152–165 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Moore, P.A., St George, A.: Children as information seekers: the cognitive demands of books and library systems. Sch. Libr. Media Q. 19(3), 161–68 (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ordelman, R., Melgar, L., Van Gorp, J., Noordegraaf, J.: Media suite: unlocking audiovisual archives for mixed Media scholarly research. In: Selected papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference, vol. 159, pp. 133–143 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ordelman, R., et al.: Data stories in CLARIAH: developing a research infrastructure for storytelling with heritage and culture data. In: DARIAH Annual Event 2022 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  14. van der Sluis, F., van Dijk, B.: A closer look at children’s information retrieval usage. In: 33st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2010) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision: Gemeenschappelijke thesaurus audiovisuele archieven (30-10-2023). https://www.beeldengeluid.nl/kennis/kennisthemas/metadata/gemeenschappelijke-thesaurus-audiovisuele-archieven

  16. Spavold, J.: The child as naïve user: a study of database use with young children. Int. J. Man-Mach. Stud. 32(6), 603–625 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Taelman, R., Van Herwegen, J., Vander Sande, M., Verborgh, R.: Comunica: a modular sparql query engine for the web. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Semantic Web Conference (2018). https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Resource/

  18. Trippas, J.R., Spina, D., Thomas, P., Sanderson, M., Joho, H., Cavedon, L.: Towards a model for spoken conversational search. Inform. Process. Manage. 57(2), 102162 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Vanderschantz, N., Hinze, A.: Do internet search engines support children’s search query construction: a visual analysis (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Vanderschantz, N., Hinze, A.: Children’s query formulation and search result exploration. Int. J. Digit. Libr. 22(4), 385–410 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Vanderschantz, N., Hinze, A., Cunningham, S.J.: “Sometimes the internet reads the question wrong” children’s search strategies & difficulties: “Sometimes the Internet reads the question wrong” children’s search strategies & difficulties. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 51(1), 1–10 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.2014.14505101053, http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/meet.2014.14505101053

  22. Weber, I., Jaimes, A.: Who uses web search for what: and how. In: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 15–24. WSDM 2011, Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935839, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1935826.1935839

  23. Williams, J.D., Raux, A., Henderson, M.: The dialog state tracking challenge series: a review. Dialogue Discourse 7(3), 4–33 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Yarosh, S., et al.: Children asking questions: speech interface reformulations and personification preferences. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 300–312. IDC 2018. Association for Computing Machinery, Trondheim, Norway (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3202207

  25. Zamani, H., Trippas, J.R., Dalton, J., Radlinski, F.: Conversational Information Seeking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08808 (2022)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Beelen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Beelen, T., Ordelman, R., Truong, K.P., Evers, V., Huibers, T. (2024). A Conversational Robot for Children’s Access to a Cultural Heritage Multimedia Archive. In: Goharian, N., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-56068-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-56069-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics