Computer Assisted Language Learning



    Abstract

    We are developing a dialogue system for English conversation tutoring. It aims to provide intelligent one-to-one English conversation tutoring instead of old fashioned language education with static multimedia materials. This system can understand poor expressions of students and it enables green hands to engage in a dialogue in spite of their poor linguistic ability, which gives students interesting motivation to learn a foreign language. And this system also has educational functionalities to improve the linguistic ability. To achieve these goals, we have developed a statistical natural language understanding module for understanding poor expressions and an example-based dialogue manager with high domain scalability and several effective tutoring methods.


    Research Issues

    • Language understanding for the non-native
      • Improve robustness by adopting statistical methods
      • Use features designed for common errors of non-native speakers
    • Flexible dialouge modeling for diverse conversation themes
      • Improve scalibility by adopting data driven methods
      • Example-based dialogue management can support various domains easily
    • Tutoring methods and Feedback generation
      • Implicit tutoring helps students learn appropriate expressions without stress
      • Explicit tutoring helps students continue the conversation when they do not know what to say
      • Final feedback indicate week points of an individual student

    System Architecture

    Implicit Tutoring

    • Even though the expressions of students are not perfect, the system can provides sound examples on screen

    Explicit Tutoring

    • When students do not know what to say, the system provides explicit tutoring so that students can continue the conversation

    Feedback generation

    • Assessment
      • Collect assessment data for learning session and calculate final score to give feedback
      • Feedback message reflects individual perspective to improve
    • Criteria
      • Mission Completion
      • Elapsed Time
      • Utterance Suitability
      • Help Frequency
      • Filler Word Frequency

  • Contact




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