Conversational Agents in Language and Culture Training

Abstract

This chapter describes the design, implementation, and use of an agent architecture that has been deployed in Alelo, Inc.’s language and culture training systems, which offer practical training for foreign language skills and intercultural competence. These agents support real-time conversation in the language of interest (Dari, Pashto, Arabic, French, and others), using automatic speech recognition and immersive simulation technologies. In earlier work, we developed a number of agent-based language and culture trainers, based on the Tactical Language and Culture Training System platform. Our experience has revealed a number of desiderata for authorable, believable agents, which we have applied to the design of our newest agent architecture. In this chapter, we describe the Virtual Role-Players (VRP), an agent architecture that relies on ontological models of world knowledge, language, culture, and agent state, in order to achieve believable dialogue with learners. Authoring and user experiences are described, along with future directions for this work.