AI Meets Austen: Towards Human-Robot Discussions of Literary Metaphor

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing formal education, fueled by innovations in learning assessment, content generation, and instructional delivery. Informal, lifelong learning settings have been the subject of less attention. We provide a proof-of-concept for an embodied book discussion companion, designed to stimulate conversations with readers about particularly creative metaphors in fiction literature. We collect ratings from 26 participants, each of whom discuss Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" with the robot across one or more sessions, and find that participants rate their interactions highly. This suggests that companion robots could be an interesting entryway for the promotion of lifelong learning and cognitive exercise in future applications.