This paper discusses the use of natural language or „conversational‟ agents in e-learning environments. We describe and contrast the various applications of conversational agent technology represented in the e-learning literature, including tutors, learning companions, language practice and systems to encourage reflection. We offer two more detailed examples of conversational agents, one which ...

Polite behavior in intelligent conversational systems requires mixed-initiative dialog. AutoTutor is an intelligent tutoring system in which several of these conversational skills are implemented. This paper discusses some aspects of mixed-initiative dialog, as implemented in AutoTutor ranging from discourse markers, dialog moves and speech acts to question answering. In addition some of the st...

This article presents a critique of the concept of cognitive distortion as it has been developed within the domain of sex-offender treatment programme theory and practice. Drawing upon a discursive psychology perspective, it is argued that cognitive distortions should not be considered as mental entities but as social practices. This argument is illustrated by closely examining how offenders‟ a...

Interactions with conversational systems take diverse forms across applications and individual users. In order to develop intelligent systems that can accommodate these diverse conversational user experience (UX) needs and preferences, meanwhile balancing implementation costs, we propose a computationdriven approach to profile conversational interactions by measuring dialogue complexity of user...

With the rise of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), there is a necessary in human effort to identify conversations containing misunderstood user inputs. These uncover error natural language understanding and help prioritize improvements IVA. As analysis time consuming expensive, prioritizing where misunderstanding has likely occurred reduces costs speeds IVA improvement. In addition, less r...

as the arabic formal language is the national unifier that unites the sons of the arabs, so that it is a common language and the one of the holy quran, ideological inherited, and the language of science and knowledge, vulgar dialects in different arab countries, however, differ to the extent that, for example, a man from one of the eastern arab countries isn't able to find out the accent o...

Conventional synthetic voices can synthesise neutral read aloud speech well. But, to make synthetic speech more suitable for a wider range of applications, the voices need to express more than just the word identity. We need to develop voices that can partake in a conversation and express, e.g. agreement, disagreement, hesitation, in a natural and believable manner. In speech synthesis there ar...

Learning/training is an important application domain for intelligent agents technologies supporting believable dialogues and realistic virtual environments. In this paper, we first review, in section 2, some of the current applications and research in technology-enhanced learning. In section 3 we discuss the impact of conversational agents on the design of more effective individual and group/co...