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Interaction Challenges in AI Equipped Environments Built to Teach Foreign Languages Through Dialogue and Task-Completion

Published: 08 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

As cities around the world become more diverse in culture and language, there is a growing need for learning foreign languages. To further this excitement, we have built a human-scale, immersive room with a virtual AI agent that aids foreign language learning. Our system aids the language learning process through task-completion exercises using multi-modal dialogue. The Cognitive and Immersive Room (CIR) is developed as an immersive Chinese restaurant to teach Mandarin, but the interaction challenges and solutions can be reasonably generalized to other languages taught using similar techniques. As users interact with the immersive environment and the virtual AI agent, they face several user interaction challenges. These challenges arise from new learners' lack of proficiency in the foreign language. By studying user interactions in the CIR, we were able to articulate some of the interaction challenges. We have enhanced the AI agent, virtual environment, and the on-boarding process for new users to mitigate these challenges. The enhancements and the results which show that they were effective are discussed here.

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  • (2023)Centering Software: Drawing on UX Research to Develop Methods of Collaborative Inquiry into Software Rhetorics within Writing CentersProceedings of the 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication10.1145/3615335.3623006(26-31)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Exploring AI chatbot affordances in the EFL classroom: young learners’ experiences and perspectivesComputer Assisted Language Learning10.1080/09588221.2021.202124137:1-2(1-26)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2022
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  1. Interaction Challenges in AI Equipped Environments Built to Teach Foreign Languages Through Dialogue and Task-Completion

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIS '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference
    June 2018
    1418 pages
    ISBN:9781450351980
    DOI:10.1145/3196709
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 08 June 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. immersive room
    2. intelligent agent
    3. language teaching
    4. mandarin as a foreign language
    5. mandarin teaching
    6. multi-modal interaction
    7. three dimensional virtual worlds

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    DIS '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 487 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Centering Software: Drawing on UX Research to Develop Methods of Collaborative Inquiry into Software Rhetorics within Writing CentersProceedings of the 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication10.1145/3615335.3623006(26-31)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
    • (2022)Exploring AI chatbot affordances in the EFL classroom: young learners’ experiences and perspectivesComputer Assisted Language Learning10.1080/09588221.2021.202124137:1-2(1-26)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2022
    • (2021)Evaluation of Animation and Lip-Sync of Avatars, and User Interaction in Immersive Virtual Reality Learning Environments2021 International Conference on Graphics and Interaction (ICGI)10.1109/ICGI54032.2021.9655283(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2021
    • (2021)Immersive Virtual Reality for Foreign Language Education: A PRISMA Systematic ReviewIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30688589(48952-48962)Online publication date: 2021
    • (2021)Foreign language acquisition via artificial intelligence and extended reality: design and evaluationComputer Assisted Language Learning10.1080/09588221.2021.187916235:9(2332-2360)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2021
    • (2021)Conversational Agents in Language Education: Where They Fit and Their Research ChallengesHCI International 2021 - Late Breaking Posters10.1007/978-3-030-90179-0_35(272-279)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2021
    • (2020)HUMAINE: Human Multi-Agent Immersive Negotiation CompetitionExtended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3334480.3383001(1-10)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2020
    • (2019)You Talkin’ to Me? A Practical Attention-Aware Embodied AgentHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 201910.1007/978-3-030-29387-1_44(760-780)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2019
    • (2019)Language Learning in a Cognitive and Immersive Environment Using Contextualized Panoramic ImageryHCI International 2019 - Posters10.1007/978-3-030-23525-3_26(202-209)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2019
    • (2018)CIRA: An Architecture for Building Configurable Immersive Smart-RoomsIntelligent Systems and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-01057-7_7(76-95)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2018

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