Motivating Narrative Representation for Training Cross-cultural Interaction

Abstract Scenario-based training provides valuable opportunities for practice and assessment of cross-cultural skills in representative environments. Cross-cultural training that is presented within scenarios can help to motivate trainees and to increase perceptions of relevance and validity. Further, with immersive computer simulations, a sufficiently rich representation can enable tailoring of content, delivering support or challenge for individual trainees when scenario events play out in a variety of ways. However, training scenarios delivered via a computer simulation can be difficult for end users such as instructors to create or to change after they are created. One source of this difficulty is the lack explicit representation of the goals of training or rationales for their design. As a consequence, technical personnel are typically required to make changes, resulting in a process that is costly, slow, and prone to communication errors. Further, training scenarios can become obsolete or fail to reflect the varied needs of different instructors. In this paper, we identify specific limitations to the scenario definition and describe an alternative approach based on computational narrative. The new approach is designed to enable a training system to reason about what training content to tailor and why to deliver suitably tailored and individualized training.