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 quantitative and qualitative findings,
we discuss opportunities for leveraging LLMs to design child-friendly chatbots
to support children in sharing their emotions.

ChaCha 是一个鼓励并引导儿童分享个人事件和相关情感的聊天机器人，通过结合状态机和大型语言模型，ChaCha 能保持对话的连贯性，在与儿童进行自由对话时指导儿童表达情感。通过与 20 名 8-12 岁儿童的探索性研究，我们发现参与者将 ChaCha 视为亲密的朋友，分享了关于家庭旅行和个人成就等各种话题的故事。基于定量和定性研究结果，我们讨论了利用语言模型设计儿童友好型聊天机器人支持儿童情感表达的机会。