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This article proposes a computer-based approach to effectively enhance second language learners' willingness to communicate in the target language. To do so, we implemented a conversational agent embedding a dialogue management model based on two conversational strategies (i.e., communication strategies and affective backchannels), serving as scaffolds for enhancing learners' willingness to communicate in the target language. Here, we report on differences observed among second language learners' preferences for both conversational strategies according to their initial level of willingness to communicate and on variations of their willingness with respect to such differences. Although we found that most students generally preferred a combination of both strategies, learners' preferences and the effects of the support provided by these strategies varied according to their level of willingness to communicate. Learners with lower willingness to communicate tended to prefer affective backchannels, whereas those with higher willingness to communicate seemed to favor communication strategies. These results were consistent with post-test results, which showed that learners' expected willingness to communicate tended to be higher after interacting with systems embedding their preferred strategies. In sum, these results are preliminary evidence of the meaningfulness of accounting for such learners' preferences in adaptively using and fading the strategies employed by conversational agents to motivate second language learners to communicate in the target language.

This paper describes an embodied conversational agent enhanced with specific conversational strategies aiming to foster learners' readiness towards communication in a second language (L2). Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language is believed to have a direct and sustained influence on learners' actual usage frequency of the target language. To help overcome the lack of suitable environments for increasing L2 learners' WTC, our approach is to build embodied conversational agents that can help learners surmount their apprehension towards communication in L2. Here, we focus on the dialogue management aspects of our approach and propose a model based on a set of communication strategies (CS) and affective backchannels (AB) to foster such agents' ability to carry on natural and WTC-friendly conversations with learners. We examined learners' expected WTC after interacting with one of the following versions of the system: an agent featuring both CS and AB; an agent featuring only CS; and an agent featuring only AB. The results suggested that combining CS and AB empowers the conversational agent and leads to higher expected WTC among L2 learners. We also found that even the AB-only version of the system had the potential to enhance WTC to some extent. These findings are evidence of the feasibility of enhancing L2 learners' engagement towards communication using a computer-based environment coupled with appropriate conversational strategies.

In an era characterized by rapid social change, the importance of innovation has never been more pronounced. Creativity, with its capacity to spawn fresh and valuable ideas, stands as the driving force behind innovation. A key aspect of fostering creativity is the effective utilization of others' viewpoints as catalysts for novel insights. In this paper, we propose a creative thinking support system which aims at enhancing creativity by adaptively presenting contextually relevant others' viewpoints to users as idea generation hints. The results of our experimental evaluation provide evidence on the potential of the system to effectively promote the acquisition of new ideas that users had not previously considered. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the system's capacity to generate artifacts that surpass users' own ideation capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-based conversational environments have been advocated as a promising approach for providing virtual, yet realistic opportunities for communication practice to second language learners. However, the high authoring costs of such environments continue to prevent their widespread diffusion and adoption. Furthermore, there is a limited set of authoring interfaces dedicated to making the creation of dialogue scenarios in the context of language learning easier. In this research, we present a dialogue scenario authoring system that could aid the rapid implementation of desirable dialogue scenarios, lowering the barrier to dialogue scenario authoring for non-programmers or even educators. To that end, we built a pseudo-versatile dialogue scenario authoring interface that enables the automatic generation of services-related dialogue scenarios by leveraging the common underlying structure of services (restaurant, hotel, travel planning, etc.) that appear to share a certain degree of similarity at the task level. Here, we describe the proposed system's features and present the findings of an experimental evaluation study that suggests the usefulness of our approach to facilitating dialogue scenarios designed by people with no prior experience authoring dialogue systems components. According to an evaluation of the tool by a second language teaching expert, the proposed system might also foster second language teaching and learning by allowing both educators and learners to participate in the design of dialogue scenarios that are adapted to different levels of learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]