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.

翻译：儿童通常通过与他人（特别是家人）分享自己的故事和感受来学习识别和表达情感。然而，由于儿童的语言表达能力仍在发展，父母或兄弟姐妹与儿童进行情感交流存在诸多挑战。我们提出 ChaCha——一种鼓励并引导儿童分享个人事件及相关情感的聊天机器人。ChaCha 巧妙结合状态机与大语言模型（LLMs），在维持对话方向的同时实现自由形式的交流。通过对20名8-12岁儿童的探索性研究，我们考察了 ChaCha 如何引导儿童分享个人事件并描述相关情感。参与者将 ChaCha 视为亲密伙伴，分享了家庭旅行、个人成就等多样化话题的经历。基于研究结果，我们探讨了利用大语言模型设计儿童友好型聊天机器人以支持儿童情感表达的机遇。