5 Future Trends (I): Pedagogical Conversational Agents
Diana Pérez-Marín · 2014
Future Trends (I): Pedagogical Conversational Agents IntroductionIt can be said that natural language is the most natural way for humans to interact with computers, because humans interact using natural language with other humans.That way, the users are not limited to a set of keywords, or options from a menu, but they can enter sentences in natural language that are understood by the computer, which, in turn, generates more sentences in natural language (Kelley, 1984;Zhou, 2007).Natural Language Processing techniques (Mitkov, 2003;Indurkhya & Damerau, 2010) can be used to improve human-computer interaction.In particular, natural language interaction has been widely used to support database query, question answering, command and control, and other types of information systems (Zhou, 2007).In the domain of education, natural language interfaces provide a natural method for interacting with the students (Crowley et al. 2005).In particular, using Pedagogical Conversational Agents (PCAs), that is, "lifelike autonomous characters that cohabit the learning environment creating a rich interface face-to-face with the student" (Johnson et al. 2000), has been gaining influence in the last decades, although it is still under research.Figure 5.1 shows a sample of Shamael, an agent that was developed in 2010 to encourage children to do their homework (Pérez-Marín & Pascual-Nieto, 2012).Figure 5.1: Shamael Lester et al. (1997) discovered the Persona effect, according to which, just the presence of an interactive agent in an educational computer environment has a positive influence on the students' perception of the learning experience.Moreover, Yee and Bailenson (2007) discovered the Proteus effect, according to which students are motivated to achieve the features of the agents to become more like them; and, Chase et al. ( 2009) discovered the Protégé effect, according to which students can make greater efforts to teach their agents than to study on their own.