Providing Language Instructor with Artificial Intelligence Assistant

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of developing HAL for CALL, an artificial intelligence assistant for language instructor. The assistant consists of a chatbot, an avatar (a three-dimensional visualization of the chatbot), a voice (text-to-speech engine interface) and interfaces to external sources of language knowledge. Some techniques used in adapting freely available chatbot for the need of a language learning system are presented. Integration of HAL with Second Life virtual world is proposed. We will discuss technical challenges and possible future work directions