ChaCha: Leveraging Large Language Models to Prompt Children to Share Their Emotions about Personal Events
This addresses the problem of emotional communication for children who are developing their skills, though it appears incremental in applying existing LLM technology to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the challenge of facilitating emotional communication for children by developing ChaCha, a chatbot that uses large language models to prompt children to share personal events and associated emotions, with an exploratory study involving 20 children aged 8-12 showing that participants perceived it as a close friend and shared stories on various topics.
Children typically learn to identify and express emotions through sharing their stories and feelings with others, particularly their family. However, it is challenging for parents or siblings to have emotional communication with children since children are still developing their communication skills. We present ChaCha, a chatbot that encourages and guides children to share personal events and associated emotions. ChaCha combines a state machine and large language models (LLMs) to keep the dialogue on track while carrying on free-form conversations. Through an exploratory study with 20 children (aged 8-12), we examine how ChaCha prompts children to share personal events and guides them to describe associated emotions. Participants perceived ChaCha as a close friend and shared their stories on various topics, such as family trips and personal achievements. Based on the findings, we discuss opportunities for leveraging LLMs to design child-friendly chatbots to support children in sharing emotions.