This study explored the role of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational agents in human-computer interaction, particularly in the post-coronavirus (COVID-19) era, where digital technologies are central to healthcare, customer service, and education sectors. The research investigated the disruption of context continuity when users…

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating a dialog system with an ITS created for supporting procedural training in a 3D virtual environment. To this end, we first describe the desired features of the dialog to be provided to students in such system. Then, we explain some technical issues of our proposal such as the architecture; the…

Although conversation openings and closings are ritualized speech acts (House & Kádár, 2023), they do require interactional work (Schegloff, 1986). Thus, they are important elements of interactional competence (Roever, 2022) and have been studied extensively in L2 interactions, including various types of technology-mediated communication…

Background: Analysing classroom dialogue is a widely used approach for understanding students' learning, often requiring team-based collaborative research. This presents a challenge for single researchers due to the labour-intensive nature of the process. Emerging advancements in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enhance qualitative…

To construct dialogue-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) with sufficient pedagogical expertise, a trendy research method is to mine large-scale data collected by existing dialogue-based ITS or generated between human tutors and students to discover effective tutoring strategies. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on…

With recent technological advances, researchers have begun to explore the potential use of spoken dialog systems (SDSs) for L2 oral communication assessment. While several studies support the feasibility of building these systems for various types of oral tasks, research on the construct validity of SDS-delivered tasks is still limited. Thus, this…

In order to use dialogue systems for computer assisted second-language learning systems, one of the difficult issues in such systems is how to construct large-scale dialogue knowledge that matches the dialogue modelling of a dialogue system. This paper describes how we have accomplished the short-term construction of large-scale and…

As artificially intelligent systems make their foray into the day-to-day educational experiences of students, we need to pay careful attention to the relationship between the system and the student. In this article, the authors discuss designing the personality of a virtual tutoring system called IBM Watson Tutor. The AI personality is key to the…

Museum researchers have long acknowledged the importance of dialogue in informal learning, particularly for open-ended exploratory exhibits. Novel interaction techniques like full-body interaction are appealing for these exploratory exhibits, but designers have not had a metric for determining how their designs are supporting productive learning…

Tutorial dialogue systems often simulate tactics used by experienced human tutors such as restating students' dialogue input. We investigated whether the amount of tutor restatement that supports student inference interacts with students' incoming knowledge level in predicting how much students learn from a system. We found that students with…

This paper provides a novel, conceptually driven stance on the state of the contemporary analytic challenges faced in the treatment of dialogue as a form of data across on- and offline sites of learning. In prior research, preliminary steps have been taken to detect occurrences of such dialogue using automated analysis techniques. Such advances…

This dissertation studies how people describe emotions with language and how computers can simulate this descriptive behavior. Although many non-human animals can express their current emotions as social signals, only humans can communicate about emotions symbolically. This symbolic communication of emotion allows us to talk about emotions that we…

This paper describes an approach for supporting inquiry learning from source materials, realised and tested through a tool-kit. The approach is optimised for tasks that require a student to make interpretations across sets of resources, where opinions and justifications may be hard to articulate. We adopt a dialogue-based approach to learning…

While many studies have demonstrated that conversational tutoring systems have a positive effect on learning, the amount of manual effort required to author, design, and tune dialogue behaviors remains a major barrier to widespread deployment and adoption of these systems. Such dialogue systems must not only understand student speech, but must…

Presents an approach which can provide explanations to user questions in human-machine communication in a flexible way. To determine the contents of explanations, scripts are used which have different optional components organized according to the intentions of user questions to meet their information needs. (Author/LRW)