Building a commonsense knowledge base for a collaborative storytelling agent

Storytelling is a common activity that people engage in to share and exchange information about their everyday life events. Children in particular find storytelling entertaining as they learn about their world and even share their own stories. Virtual agents are gaining popularity as conversational agents who can engage with their human users in a dialogue to answer queries and to find the necessary support in the performance of some tasks in a particular application domain. For virtual agents to be able to share stories with their human users, specially the children, they need to be provided with a body of knowledge to use in their dialogue. In this paper, we describe our approach in building an ontology to provide a knowledge base of commonsense concepts and their relations to a virtual agent. This is then used by a virtual agent to process user input as a form of story text, and to generate appropriate responses in order to encourage the child to share his/her story. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018