An Architecture to Develop Multimodal Educative Applications with Chatbots

Abstract

Animated characters are beginning to be used as pedagogical tools, as they have the power to capture students' attention and foster their motivation for discovery and learning. However, in order for them to be widely employed and accepted as a learning resource, they must be easy to use and friendly. In this paper we present an architecture that facilitates building interactive pedagogical chatbots that can interact with students in natural language. Our proposal provides a modular and scalable framework to develop such systems efficiently. Additionally, we present Geranium, a system that helps children to appreciate and protect their environment with an interactive chatbot developed following our scheme.

B. Rex: a dialogue agent for book recommendations

“…Similar to Griol and Callejas (2013), we gave a survey (n = 8) to discover strengths and weaknesses of our system. The results are given in Table 1.…”

Conversational Agents in Distance Education: Comparing Mood States with Students’ Perception

“…(Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), an open source project that until nowadays promotes the dissemination of the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) (Wallace, 1995). It won the Loebner Prize (Turing test) in 2000, 2001 and 2004. Among the Conversational Agents with educational purposes developed with AIML technology, to name a few, are: Doroty, which trains users on computer networks administration (Leonhardt et al, 2005); Blaze, created to improve user's cognitive skills in resolving mathematical problems (Aguiar, Tarouco, & Reategui, 2014); Geranium, used as a tool for learning about urban ecosystem (Griol & Callejas, 2013); and Mentor Chat, developed for collaborative language learning (Tegos et al, 2014).…”

“…The use of CA can support education in a variety of ways, for example, enabling greater interactivity, facilitating sociability and increasing the level of use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) (Kang, Nah, & Tan, 2012;Abushawar & Atwell, 2015), making it more interactive and dynamic (Griol & Callejas, 2013), and allowing instant retrieval of information without the student having to search or browse multiple web pages in order to look for answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) (Ghose & Barua, 2013). Xie & Luo (2017) argue that CA can improve the individual's skills, promote task completion and users' satisfaction by providing immediate assistance.…”

“…However, authors such as Leonhardt et al (2007), Heuvelman-Hutchinson (2012) and Rush (2015) emphasize that one of the main difficulties of DE students is the feeling of isolation that they experience, caused not only by the lack of face-to-face contact with the teacher, but also because the times they access the VLE may not be synchronous with other users' times. CA appear as an alternative to this impasse, since, according to Griol & Callejas (2013), they give the student the sensation of interacting with another user, which would be a service equivalent to having full-time tutoring. However, although CA are not new to most of people, just a minority is using them regularly and intensively (Zumstein & Hundertmark, 2017).…”

Modeling affective system and episodic memory for social companions

“…On one hand, episodic memory can improve user engagement in social companion interactions. It has been applied in various domains such as education [53,70], health and fitness [128], job interview [46], museum [102] as well as communication about user interested topics like photos [137], movies [80], traveling [18] and musics [116]. On the other hand, episodic memory can support multiple cognitive capabilities such as virtual sensing, reasoning, learning and decision making [98].…”