A Conversational Agent to Encourage Willingness to Communicate in the Context of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

We propose an embodied conversational agent based on the willingness to communicate (WTC) model in L2 to help increase WTC in the context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) by providing users with various daily conversation contexts. To simulate realistic and efficient conversations, we adopted a semantic approach in the response generation and created a system with flexible and adaptable domain knowledge, user's intent detection, and mixed-initiative conversation strategy. Our evaluation of the proposed system demonstrated its potential to increase WTC in the EFL context.