Improving Educational Dialog System for Historical World Affairs

Abstract

This study aims to introduce the process of developing a dialog system to inform users of historical world affairs. It further aims to show the process of improving the dialog system by expanding the users’ question phrases to expose the contents maximally. The dialog system’s contents contain testimonial talks made by Korean comfort women survivors of Japanese army sexual slavery during World War II. We built a dialog system to design interactions between a user and video-recorded testimonies. In the dialog system, a user is able to interact with them verbally and virtually. The system plays the role of the survivors, who underwent painful experiences during the period. In this dialog system—of which knowledge content for testimonial answers is limited—it is more important to maximally cover the prepared answers than emulate dynamic conversation, which many dialog application researchers have focused on so far to let dialogs have sequentially diverse. Therefore, we expanded question phrases using lexical relatedness and various modal expressions, thereby boosting the content coverage. Overall, this study aims to seek a digital way of representing a dialog on historical world affairs with limited contents.