Using Chatbots to Teach Languages

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive chatbot-based language learning system that offers conversational practice, automatic grammar feedback, and plans for reinforcement learning to enhance personalization, aiming to improve online language education.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive dialog system for language learning that provides real-time feedback and plans to incorporate reinforcement learning for better personalization.

Findings

System is entertaining and useful according to early users.

Provides a large-scale conversation dataset for the community.

Plans to enhance adaptivity with reinforcement learning.

Abstract

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.