One critical element of the new project is developing the ability to understand questions put to a survivor and select appropriate responses. This will allow a person to engage in an interactive dialogue with the survivor, asking questions in their own words and hearing the survivor’s response. The technology must be able to recognize similarities between word patterns in questions and answers and choose answers to new questions that are similar, but not the same as, questions for which the answers are known.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has developed a number of virtual human characters with this capability, for a variety of purposes; for example, they are used for training clinical psychologists and soldiers to conduct different kinds of interviews or recognize when someone might be lying. To achieve the level of authenticity necessary to provide viewers with a truly immersive experience, we will apply the technology to the answers Holocaust survivors give us, so that young people interacting with them will have their questions answered.

—David Traum