  Joint narratives are often used in the context of reconciliation
interventions for people in social conflict situations, which arise, for
example, due to ethnic or religious differences. The interventions aim to
encourage a change in attitudes of the participants towards each other.
Typically, a human mediator is fundamental for achieving a successful
intervention. In this work, we present an automated approach to support remote
interactions between pairs of participants as they contribute to a shared story
in their own language. A key component is an automated cognitive tutor that
guides the participants through a controlled escalation/de-escalation process
during the development of a joint narrative. We performed a controlled study
comparing a trained human mediator to the automated mediator. The results
demonstrate that an automated mediator, although simple at this stage,
effectively supports interactions and helps to achieve positive outcomes
comparable to those attained by the trained human mediator.
