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.…

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…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a digital communication method that transforms spoken discourse into written text. This rapidly evolving technology is used in email, text messaging, or live video captioning. Current ASR systems operate in conjunction with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to transform speech into text that people…