| Abstract |
Automated approaches to prevent the negative effects of
cyberbullying mainly focus on affective agents that provide support for
victims. The current paper takes a complementary approach, which
attempts to minimise the amount of occurrences of cyberbullying in the
first place. The approach consists of a system of normative agents,
which are physically present in a virtual society. The agents, which
reason based on a BDI-model, use a number of techniques to detect
various norm violations, including insulting and following. By using
rewards and punishments, they try to reinforce the desired behaviour of
the users. The system has been implemented and tested within a virtual
environment for children between 6 and 12 years old, called Club Time
Machine. In a real world experiment, the behaviour of the users of the
virtual environment has been logged and analysed by means of a
logic-based checking tool. The results show that the normative agents
have the potential to reduce the amount of norm violations on the long
term. |