4 papers
Symbolically Scaffolded Play: Designing Role-Sensitive Prompts for Generative NPC Dialogue
Vanessa Figueiredo, David Elumeze
Large Language Models (LLMs) promise to transform interactive games by enabling non-player characters (NPCs) to sustain unscripted dialogue. Yet it remains unclear whether constrai…
Designing Smarter Conversational Agents for Kids: Lessons from Cognitive Work and Means-Ends Analyses
Vanessa Figueiredo
This paper presents two studies on how Brazilian children (ages 9--11) use conversational agents (CAs) for schoolwork, discovery, and entertainment, and how structured scaffolds ca…
A Fuzzy Logic Prompting Framework for Large Language Models in Adaptive and Uncertain Tasks
Vanessa Figueiredo
We introduce a modular prompting framework that supports safer and more adaptive use of large language models (LLMs) across dynamic, user-centered tasks. Grounded in human learning…
Fuzzy, Symbolic, and Contextual: Enhancing LLM Instruction via Cognitive Scaffolding
Vanessa Figueiredo
We study how prompt-level inductive biases influence the cognitive behavior of large language models (LLMs) in instructional dialogue. We introduce a symbolic scaffolding method pa…