Related papers: Can a Humorous Conversational Agent Enhance Learni…
Conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular for supporting and facilitating learning. Conventional pedagogical agents are designed to play the role of human teachers by giving instructions to the students. In this paper, we…
Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching…
We introduce a novel category of GC-agents capable of functioning as both teachers and learners. Leveraging action-based demonstrations and language-based instructions, these agents enhance communication efficiency. We investigate the…
Conversational teachable agents offer a promising platform to support learning, both in the classroom and in remote settings. In this context, the agent takes the role of the novice, while the student takes on the role of teacher. This…
Conversational agents are increasingly used in education for learning support. An application is "learning by explaining", where learners explain their understanding to an agent. However, existing research focuses on single roles, leaving…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
This paper presents a psychologically-aware conversational agent designed to enhance both learning performance and emotional well-being in educational settings. The system combines Large Language Models (LLMs), a knowledge graph-enhanced…
When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…
Regular physical activity is crucial for reducing the risk of non-communicable disease (NCD). With NCDs on the rise globally, there is an urgent need for effective health interventions, with chatbots emerging as a viable and cost-effective…
This work investigates how personality expression and embodiment affect personality perception and learning in educational conversational agents. We extend an existing personality-driven conversational agent framework by integrating…
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…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning with social agents have allowed such models to achieve human-level performance on specific interaction tasks. However, most interactive scenarios do not have a version alone as an end goal; instead,…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…
Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject…
Addressing school bullying effectively and promptly is crucial for the mental health of students. This study examined the potential of large language models (LLMs) to empower students by discerning between bullying and joking in school peer…
Recent advancements in AI have highlighted its application in captology, the field of using computers as persuasive technologies. We hypothesized that the "conformity effect," where individuals align with others' actions, also occurs with…
Most AI-based educational tools today adopt a one-on-one tutoring paradigm, pairing a single LLM with a single learner. Yet decades of learning science research suggest that multi-party interaction -- through peer modeling, co-construction,…
Humour, a fundamental aspect of human communication, manifests itself in various styles that significantly impact social interactions and mental health. Recognising different humour styles poses challenges due to the lack of established…