A Configurable Conversational Agent to Trigger Students’ Productive Dialogue: A Pilot Study in the CALL Domain
- Research areas:
- Year:
- 2013
- Type of Publication:
- Article
- Keywords:
- conversational agents, collaborative learning, productive dialogue
-
Authors:
-
- Pages:
- 581-584
- Abstract:
- MentorChat is a CSCL system that utilizes a conversational pedagogical agent to engage students in fruitful collaboration. This conversational agent attempts to promote students’ productive dialogue by providing unsolicited prompts aimed to elicit explicit reasoning. Using MentorChat a teacher is able to design and deploy the phases and the tasks of a collaborative activity along with the support that the agent provides. In this paper, we present (a) the theoretical background Men-torChat is based on, (b) the main technical features of the system and (c) some encouraging preliminary results