Conversational Agents in Language Education: Where They Fit and Their Research Challenges

Conversational agents (or dialogue agents or Artificial Intelligent AI agents or chatbots) can provide a foreign language learner with otherwise hard-to-find conversational exposure to a new language. Such agents that teach languages differ significantly from their general-purpose counterparts in their goals, their approach, and their users’ characteristics, thereby effectively creating a new interaction paradigm for which little literature exists in the HCI of Conversational Interfaces community. The difference from general-purpose agents comes from two themes highlighted in this work: the user is not expected to know the language of interaction, and the purpose of the conversation is language education through task completion rather than task completion itself. This paper highlights the role and the research challenges of interactions with dialogue agents that allow people to learn and practice new languages.