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96 Socially Intelligent Agents(a) a set of topicsthat virtualized-ego (A) hasbrandybeersake(b) some speeches about the topic "brandy"(b1)I used to drink V.S.O.P(b2)I’m fond of diluted brandy(b3) ... .........Figure 11.2.Example of a topics-and-summaries setor “I’m fond of diluted brandy (Figure 11.2(b)) are stored in the memory of theVE and posts about other topics are stored in the same way.3.2 Flow-of-topics representationVEs change topics occasionally by referring to an associative representationset of a flow of topics. The associative representation proposed for theCoMeMo-Community [5] consists of many-to-many hyperlinks that associateone or more key unit with one or more value unit. The semantics of the associativerepresentation are not defined strictly. Instead, we leave the interpretation ofthe semantics to human association based on our tacit background knowledge.In the case of VE (a) (Figure 11.3), ‘liquor’ is a key unit and ‘brandy’ and‘beer’ are value units. This associative representation of VE (a) shows a flowof topics from liquor to brandy or beer, and other associative representationssuch as that for VE (b), shows other flows of topics.Associative representations that show associations of a community memberare stored with “topics and summaries” in the memory of VE. One mediatorselected by a user among VEs selects the next topic that is associated withthe current topic. For instance, the message for changing topics could be; “Iassociate liquor with brandy. Next, let’s talk about brandy.” We believe thatassociation-based flows of topics make the storytelling of VEs human-like andhelp users to view VEs as the independently working other selves of communitymembers.3.3 Storytelling by ordered messagesIn a turn, though all the VEs select messages associated with a topic atthe same time, only one VE is selected to speak at a time, which is done bycomparing the priorities of selected messages. Each VE generates a prioritywhen it selects a message. The criteria to decide priorities of VEs are as follows: