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A Conversational Agent to Shift Students’ Affect State

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Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (CMNA 2015, IWEC 2015, IWEC 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9935))

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Abstract

When a student is feeling negatively while doing some required tasks in a learning environment, in this case, a reading assessment exercise, a conversation with the tutor agent can be initiated to engage the student in an affective text-based dialogue as a means of intervention. Such dialogue can revolve around everyday, commonsense topics that may be related to the reading material or exercise at hand. A semantic ontology populated with commonsense concepts from existing knowledge sources, specifically ConceptNet and SenticNet, provides the conversational agent with the candidate set of topics for discourse. To facilitate the validation of the dialogue system with children, the conversational tutor agent was integrated into a learning environment platform that supports reading of short stories.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Language Technologies, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

    Ethel Chua Joy Ong & Zhayne Chong Soriano

Authors
  1. Ethel Chua Joy Ong
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  2. Zhayne Chong Soriano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ethel Chua Joy Ong .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UniversitĂ  degli Studi di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. UniversitĂ  degli Studi di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Cristina Baroglio

  3. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Floris Bex

  4. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Floriana Grasso

  5. University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA

    Nancy Green

  6. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad

  7. Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Masayuki Numao

  8. De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

    Merlin Teodosia Suarez

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Ong, E.C.J., Soriano, Z.C. (2016). A Conversational Agent to Shift Students’ Affect State. In: Baldoni, M., et al. Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. CMNA IWEC IWEC 2015 2015 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46218-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46218-9_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46217-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46218-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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