Trends, applications, and challenges of chatbot technology

Chatbots offer exceptional services to end-users due to various factors, including the ability to respond to customer requests quickly according to their convenience. Given the magnitude of research and interest in chatbots, further study on several vital and evolving concerns including human-bot interaction, chatbot adoption, chatbot architecture, design considerations, and chatbot applications in various domains including education and customer support is necessary. Trends, Applications, and Challenges of Chatbot Technology provides novel research content and reviews of current chatbot technology and sheds light on challenges and open questions as well as possible research directions. Covering key topics such as human-computer interaction, education, customer support, and algorithms, this reference work is ideal for computer scientists, industry professionals, policymakers, researchers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, instructors, and students

Pedagogical Agents for Fostering Question-Asking Skills in Children

Question asking is an important tool for constructing academic knowledge, and a self-reinforcing driver of curiosity. However, research has found that question asking is infrequent in the classroom and children's questions are often superficial, lacking deep reasoning. In this work, we developed a pedagogical agent that encourages children to ask divergent-thinking questions, a more complex form of questions that is associated with curiosity. We conducted a study with 95 fifth grade students, who interacted with an agent that encourages either convergent-thinking or divergent-thinking questions. Results showed that both interventions increased the number of divergent-thinking questions and the fluency of question asking, while they did not significantly alter children's perception of curiosity despite their high intrinsic motivation scores. In addition, children's curiosity trait has a mediating effect on question asking under the divergent-thinking agent, suggesting that question-asking interventions must be personalized to each student based on their tendency to be curious.Comment: Accepted at CHI 202

A corpus based approach to generalise a chatbot system

Chatbot tools are computer programs which interact with users using natural languages. Most developers built their systems aiming to fool users that they are talking with real humans. Up to now most chatbots serve as a tool to amuse users through chatting with a robot. However, the knowledge bases of almost all chatbots are edited manually which restricts users to specific languages and domains. This thesis shows that chatbot technology could be used in many different ways in addition to being a tool for fun. A chatbot could be used as a tool to learn or study a new language, a tool to access an information system, a tool to visualise the contents of a corpus and a tool to give answers to questions in a specific domain. Instead of being restricted to a specific domain or written language, a chatbot could be trained with any text in any language. Some of the differences between real human conversations and human-chatbot dialogues are presented. A Java program has been developed to read a text from a machine readaatbble text (corpus) and convert it to ALICE chatbot format language (AIML). The program was built to be general, the generality in this respect implies no restrictions on specific language, domain or structure. Different languages were tested: English, Arabic, Afrikaans, French and Spanish. At the same time different corpora structures were used: dialogue, monologue and structured text

A corpus-based approach to generalising a chatbot system

International research in NLP is dominated by work on English. NLP techniques and systems can be ported to other natural languages, but this is generally a labour-intensive task, requiring scarce computational and linguistic expertise; hence minority languages are poorly represented in NLP technology. We present an automated approach to porting an NLP technology, the AIML-based chatbot, to new languages, by using a corpus in the target language to retrain the chatbot. We have successfully automated production of chatbots talking French, and Afrikaans; and are developing further demonstrators in Spanish and Arabic

Evaluating Web Accessibility of Educational Websites

Web accessibility concerns of building websites that are accessible by all people regardless of their ability or disability. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been established to raise awareness of universal access. WAI develops guidelines which can help to ensure that Web pages are widely accessible. Assistive technology is used to increase, improve, and maintain capabilities of disabled persons to execute tasks that are sometimes difficult or impossible to do without technical aid. Also it helps them achieve their scholar, professional and social activities. This paper exposes an approach to investigate accessible contents of educational websites to ensure and measure its compliance with accessibility standards for visually impaired people. This study focuses on studying existing standards and investigating its applicability on educational institute websites. This will increase accessibility on e-learning materials that are provided by educational institutes. In this paper a sample of websites at selected universities in Jordan are evaluated in terms of accessibility in comparison to some universities websites in England and Arabic region. Results show that accessibility errors of universities websites in Jordan, and Arab region exceed the ones in UK by 13 times, and 5 times consequently

A Chatbot as a Natural Web Interface to Arabic Web QA

In this paper, we describe a way to access Arabic Web Question Answering (QA) corpus using a chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. Any Natural Language (NL) interface to Question Answer (QA) system is constrained to reply with the given answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large) set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In previous research, this approach works properly with English and other European languages. In this paper, we try to see how the same chatbot will react in terms of Arabic Web QA corpus. Initial results shows that 93% of answers were correct, but because of a lot of characteristics related to Arabic language, changing Arabic questions into other forms may lead to no answers

Utilizing AOU’VLE with other Computerized Systems

We present in this paper our experience of utilizing the virtual learning environment system with other computerized systems. Arab Open University is one of the first organizations that adopt an e-learning methodology in the Arabic region. We present Moodle as a virtual learning environment (VLM) used at AOU. The integration process of VLE with other online systems such as student information system (SIS) and human resource system (HRS) is discussed. In addition to that we describe the in-house development and enhancement generated to the VLE to cope with AOU regulations and rules. The quality assurance strategy of AOU is clarified