14 research outputs found
Bots as language learning tools
Foreign Language Learning (FLL) students commonly have few opportunities to use their target language. Teachers in FLL situations do their best to create opportunities during classes through pair or group work, but a variety of factors ranging from a lack of time to shyness or limited opportunity for quality feedback hamper this. This paper discusses online chatbots' potential role in fulfilling this need. Chatbots could provide a means of language practice for students anytime and virtually anywhere.
211 students used two well-known bots in class and their feedback was recorded with a brief written survey. Most students enjoyed using the chatbots. They also generally felt more comfortable conversing with the bots than a student partner or teacher. This is a budding technology that has up to now been designed primarily for native speakers of English. In their present state chatbots are generally only useful for advanced and/or very keen language students. However, means exist now for language teachers to get involved and bring this technology into the FLL classroom as a permanent tool for language practice.link_to_OA_fulltex
Stupid computer! Abuse and social identities
Abstract. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of verbal abuse in spontaneous human-chatterbot conversations. An ethnographic study suggested that abuse is pervasive and may reflect an asymmetrical power distribution, where the user is the master, and the chatterbot the slave. We propose that verbal aggression in this setting may be a social norm applied by users to differentiate themselves from the machine in what can be regarded as a form of interspecies conflict. The findings stress the importance of naturalistic, ethnographic studies to uncover social dynamics of virtual relationships
Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time
Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust
than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and
monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high
quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce
Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over
time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more
scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to
automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80
participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself
without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long
been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems;
Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed
system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation
on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain
dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18
Diagenesis of archaeological bone and tooth
An understanding of the structural complexity of mineralised tissues is fundamental for exploration into the field of diagenesis. Here we review aspects of current and past research on bone and tooth diagenesis using the most comprehensive collection of literature on diagenesis to date. Environmental factors such as soil pH, soil hydrology and ambient temperature, which influence the preservation of skeletal tissues are assessed, while the different diagenetic pathways such as microbial degradation, loss of organics, mineral changes, and DNA degradation are surveyed. Fluctuating water levels in and around the bone is the most harmful for preservation and lead to rapid skeletal destruction. Diagenetic mechanisms are found to work in conjunction with each other, altering the biogenic composition of skeletal material. This illustrates that researchers must examine multiple diagenetic pathways to fully understand the post-mortem interactions of archaeological skeletal material and the burial environment
Bots for language learning now: Current and future directions
Bots are destined to dominate how humans interact with the internet of things that continues to grow around them. Despite their still budding intellectual capacity, major companies (e.g., Apple, Google and Amazon) have already placed (chat)bots at the centre of their flagship devices. (Chat)Bots currently fill the internet acting as guides, merchants and assistants. Chatbots, designed as communicators, however, have yet to make a meaningful contribution to perhaps their most natural vocation: foreign language learning partners. This review engages in three questions that surround this issue:
1. Why are chatbots not already at the centre of foreign language learning?
2. What are two key developers of chatbots working towards that might push chatbots into the language learning spotlight?
3. What might researchers, educators, and developers together do to support chatbots as foreign language learning partners right now
The heart and home of horror: The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century
This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionally degraded air quality came to be associated with the threat of physical and psychological degeneration in the poorest inner and eastern districts of the city. Perceived as a totality, these bodies of knowledge and ideology - economic, epidemiological and social Darwinistic - reinforced and legitimated a catastrophist fin de siècle vision of almost unbearably debilitating social, economic and cultural relationships between 'darkness at noon' and the potential implosion of the late nineteenth century metropolis