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…

Programming skills are a vital part of many disciplines but can be challenging to teach and learn. Thus, the programming courses are considered difficult and a major stumbling block. To overcome these challenges, students could benefit from extensive individual support such as tutoring, but there are simply not enough qualified tutors available to…

Video is the most widely used format to deliver a lecture by the tutor/lecturer in electronic distance learning. One of the video presentation styles is a dialogue style where the learning material is presented with a dialogue between a tutor/teacher and a tutee student. The presence of the tutee and dialogues provide cues that enable the observer…

Jim Greer and his colleagues argued that student modelling is essential to provide adaptive instruction in tutoring systems and showed that effective modelling is possible, despite being enormously challenging. Student modelling plays a prominent role in many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that address problem-solving domains. However,…

How can we test whether state-of-the-art generative models, such as Blender and GPT-3, are good AI teachers, capable of replying to a student in an educational dialogue? Designing an AI teacher test is challenging: although evaluation methods are much-needed, there is no off-the-shelf solution to measuring pedagogical ability. This paper reports…

For the development of successful human-agent dialogue-based tutoring systems, it is essential to understand what makes a human-human tutorial dialogue successful. While there has been much research on dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems, there have been comparatively fewer studies on analyzing large-scale datasets of human-human online…

Voice interaction assistants, such as "Siri," "Alexa," or "Google Assistant," offer new opportunities to create meaningful, fun tasks for language learning that require accurate spoken production. Designing good tasks requires an understanding of the learning context and needs as well as the interactional…

The use of technology as a facilitator in learning environments has become increasingly prevalent with the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. As such, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) gains a wider adoption in contrast to traditional learning methods. At the same time, the need for automated tools capable of assessing and…

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…

This article presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on dialogue-based CALL, resulting in a conceptual framework for research on the matter. Applications allowing a learner to have a conversation in a foreign language with a computer have been studied from various perspectives and under different names (dialogue systems,…

This article proposes a computer-based approach to effectively enhance second language learners' willingness to communicate in the target language. To do so, we implemented a conversational agent embedding a dialogue management model based on two conversational strategies (i.e., communication strategies and affective backchannels), serving as…

This research involved the design of a task-based dialogue system and evaluation of its learning effectiveness. Dialogue training still heavily depends on human communication with instant feedback or correction. However, it is not possible to provide a personal tutor for every English learner. With the rapid development of information technology,…

Prior research has shown that, under certain conditions, Human-Agent (H-A) alignment exists to a stronger degree than that found in Human-Human (H-H) communication. In an H-H Second Language (L2) setting, evidence of alignment has been linked to learning and teaching strategy. We present a novel analysis of H-A and H-H L2 learner dialogues using…

This paper presents a chatbot for a Dialogue-Based Computer Assisted Language Learning (DB-CALL) system. The chatbot helps users learn language via free conversations. To improve the chatbot performance, this paper adopts a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine to combine with an existing search-based engine, and also extracts a small domain…

This study investigated the impact of conversational agent formality on the quality of summaries and formality of written summaries during the training session and on posttest in a trialog-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). During training, participants learned summarization strategies with the guidance of conversational agents who spoke one…