Abstract
While writing plays a central role in writing learning, non-native learners often find difficulty in writing English, which hinders them from engaging in writing exercises. This paper examines the hypothesis that even the simplest chatbot (such as ELIZA) has a positive effect on assisting learners in writing more. We empirically show such a tendency by comparing words that learners produce by using a standard editor and a chatbot-based writing system. We further look into the writing results, showing that the chatbot-based system has good effects on word usage and self-revision. Finally, we propose a new writing exercise combining the chatbot-based system with the conventional method.
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Notes
- 1.
The input and output of the chatbot-based system are not actually utterances but rather typed and written sentences. Nevertheless, the term utterance is used in this paper for illustration purposes.
- 2.
- 3.
Because of the copyright issue, the actual content cannot be included in the paper. Instead, their bi-grams are shown in the appendix.
- 4.
Table 2 includes only words whose occurrences are more than three.
- 5.
Bi-grams concerning articles are shown in the appendix.
- 6.
Rather, they might write without considering organization because the system guides the writing activity although the resulting writing is well organized. What is important here is to let learners consider organization for a writing learning exercise themselves.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on this paper. This work was partly supported by Konan Premier Project and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), PRESTO Grant Number JPMJPR1758, Japan
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A Bi-grams Obtained from the Experimental Results
A Bi-grams Obtained from the Experimental Results
The contents of the writing results cannot be provided because of the copyright issue. Instead, this appendix shows bi-grams and their statistics obtained from the writing results. Table 5 shows top ten bi-grams obtained from the experimental results. Table 6 shows top ten bi-grams starting with the indefinite article that were obtained from the experimental results. Table 7 shows top ten bi-grams starting with the definite article that were obtained from the experimental results.
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Nagata, R., Hashiguchi, T., Sadoun, D. (2020). Is the Simplest Chatbot Effective in English Writing Learning Assistance?. In: Nguyen, LM., Phan, XH., Hasida, K., Tojo, S. (eds) Computational Linguistics. PACLING 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1215. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6168-9_21
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