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Chapter 11EGOCHAT AGENTA Talking Virtualized Agent that Supports CommunityKnowledge CreationHidekazu Kubota and Toyoaki NishidaThe University of Tokyo, Faculty of EngineeringAbstractThis paper proposes a method that supports knowledge creation in a communityby mean of talking virtualized-egos. A virtualized-ego is a conversationalagent that represents a community member. Community members can exchangetheir knowledge by talking with virtualized-egos even when some members areaway because the virtualized-egos replay appropriate past messages posted bythe absent members. Moreover, messages of virtualized-egos are ordered as astory. A story is a series of comments that reflects relationships between communitymembers. We have developed a system called EgoChat to investigate theseideas and carried out an experiment to ascertain its effectiveness for communityknowledge creation.1. IntroductionIn the human community, intelligent agents can facilitate community activitiesby interacting with humans. Such social agents have been studied in theresearch area called Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) [2]. This paper presents asocial agent that tells autobiographical stories on behalf of a community memberand supports community knowledge creation. Among the human processesinvolved in knowledge creation, informal communication aimed at relatingpersonal experiences results in the creation of innovative knowledge [7]. Inthe same way, interaction among humans and agents can also be enriched bypersonal experiences. Telling autobiographical stories about oneself promotessocial understanding between humans and agents, thus improving relationshipsbetween them [3]. The great challenge in SIA research that we address in thispaper is how to generate autobiographical conversations from our daily e-mails.Because the recent progress in communication technologies on electronic mediasuch as e-mail or the WWW has made participating in a community much