Language is an essential component of human communication and interaction. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, specifically in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech-recognition, have made is possible for conversational agents, also known as chatbots, to converse with language learners in a way that mimics human speech.…

With the increased adoption and use of smart home speakers in households, many young children have learned to use listening and speaking to interact with the voice assistants (VAs) for a variety of daily activities (e.g., asking questions, listening to music). Despite the proliferation of VAs, due to the technical limitations such as automatic…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

English speaking is considered the most difficult and anxiety-provoking language skill for EFL learners due to lack of access to authentic language use, fear of making mistakes, and peers' negative comments. With automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have potential in foreign language…

In this investigation we propose new machine learning methods for automated scoring models that predict the vocabulary acquisition in science and social studies of second grade English language learners, based upon free-form spoken responses. We evaluate performance on an existing dataset and use transfer learning from a large pre-trained language…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in language education; however, the trends, research issues, and applications of AI in language learning remain largely under-investigated. Accordingly, the present paper, using bibliometric analysis, investigates these issues via a review of 516 papers published between 2000 and…

This paper describes My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades (7 to 11 years old) through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor. In our study, individual students engage in spoken dialogs with the virtual tutor Marni during 15 to 20 minute…