Developing meta-affective skills via chatbots

This paper focuses on the pedagogical role virtual agents play in educational contexts on the Web, in particular in those that are aimed at learning a second language. The agent, or chatbot, exploits the social interaction between the second language learner and what the tutoring software offers, and its main task is to enhance students’ communicative and meta-affective skills. Research demonstrates that it is already possible to treat affective traits computationally in order for intelligent agents to recognize, interpret and reproduce them.