Related papers: Conversational agents for fostering curiosity-driv…
From the earliest years of our lives, humans use language to express our beliefs and desires. Being able to talk to artificial agents about our preferences would thus fulfill a central goal of value alignment. Yet today, we lack…
Virtual companions that interact with users in a socially complex environment require a wide range of social skills. Displaying curiosity is simultaneously a factor to improve a companion's believability and to unobtrusively affect the…
We present pathways of investigation regarding conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for children in the classroom. We highlight anticipated challenges to be addressed in order to advance knowledge on CUIs for children. Further, we discuss…
We hypothesize that curiosity is a mechanism found by evolution that encourages meaningful exploration early in an agent's life in order to expose it to experiences that enable it to obtain high rewards over the course of its lifetime. We…
We investigate the problem of generating informative questions in information-asymmetric conversations. Unlike previous work on question generation which largely assumes knowledge of what the answer might be, we are interested in the…
Using robots in educational contexts has already shown to be beneficial for a student's learning and social behaviour. For levitating them to the next level of providing more effective and human-like tutoring, the ability to adapt to the…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
For machine agents to successfully interact with humans in real-world settings, they will need to develop an understanding of human mental life. Intuitive psychology, the ability to reason about hidden mental variables that drive observable…
We seek to create agents that both act and communicate with other agents in pursuit of a goal. Towards this end, we extend LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019) -- a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text-game -- with a dataset of quests. These…
Multi-agent AI systems, which simulate diverse instructional roles such as teachers and peers, offer new possibilities for personalized and interactive learning. Yet, student-AI interaction patterns and their pedagogical implications remain…
Two key challenges within Reinforcement Learning involve improving (a) agent learning within environments with sparse extrinsic rewards and (b) the explainability of agent actions. We describe a curious subgoal focused agent to address both…
In this paper, we propose Tutoring bot, a generative chatbot trained on a large scale of tutor-student conversations for English-language learning. To mimic a human tutor's behavior in language education, the tutor bot leverages diverse…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
In this work, we investigate how two factors, metacognitive skills and motivation, would impact student learning across domains. More specifically, our primary goal is to identify the critical, yet robust, interaction patterns of these two…
This paper presents two studies on how Brazilian children (ages 9--11) use conversational agents (CAs) for schoolwork, discovery, and entertainment, and how structured scaffolds can enhance these interactions. In Study 1, a seven-week…
This study investigates the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered, multi-role chatbots as a means to enhance learning experiences and foster engagement in computer science education. Leveraging a design-based research approach, we…
Digital agents are considered a general-purpose technology. They spread quickly in private and organizational contexts, including education. Yet, research lacks a conceptual framing to describe interaction with such agents in a holistic…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
We present a method for combining multi-agent communication and traditional data-driven approaches to natural language learning, with an end goal of teaching agents to communicate with humans in natural language. Our starting point is a…