Scaffolding collaborative learning opportunities: integrating microworld use and argumentation
UMAP'11 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Advances in User Modeling
Coordinating multi-dimensional support in collaborative conversational agents
ITS'12 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Towards academically productive talk supported by conversational agents
ITS'12 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Discovering habits of effective online support group chatrooms
Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
Triggering effective social support for online groups
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS)
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Tutorial Dialog Systems that employ Conversational Agents (CAs) to deliver instructional content to learners in one-on-one tutoring settings have been shown to be effective in multiple learning domains by multiple research groups. Our work focuses on extending this successful learning technology to collaborative learning settings involving two or more learners interacting with one or more agents. Experience from extending existing techniques for developing conversational agents into multiple-learner settings highlights two underlying assumptions from the one-learner setting that do not generalize well to the multiuser setting, and thus cause difficulties. These assumptions include what we refer to as the near-even participation assumption and the known addressee assumption. A new software architecture called Basilica that allows us to address and overcome these limitations is a major contribution of this article. The Basilica architecture adopts an object-oriented approach to represent agents as a network composed of what we refer to as behavioral components because they enable the agents to engage in rich conversational behaviors. Additionally, we describe three specific conversational agents built using Basilica in order to illustrate the desirable properties of this new architecture.