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

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.