Using Chatbots to Teach Languages
This work addresses the need for accessible language learning tools, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing dialog system and feedback technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of providing conversational practice for language learners by developing an adaptive chatbot system that adjusts to users' proficiency levels and offers automatic grammar error feedback, with initial adopters finding it entertaining and useful.
This paper reports on progress towards building an online language learning tool to provide learners with conversational experience by using dialog systems as conversation practice partners. Our system can adapt to users' language proficiency on the fly. We also provide automatic grammar error feedback to help users learn from their mistakes. According to our first adopters, our system is entertaining and useful. Furthermore, we will provide the learning technology community a large-scale conversation dataset on language learning and grammar correction. Our next step is to make our system more adaptive to user profile information by using reinforcement learning algorithms.