Adaptive Agents for Promoting Intercultural Skills

Pedagogic conversational agents can be effective in promoting the acquisition of language and intercultural skills, both as virtual coaches and virtual conversational partners. This paper gives an overview of a framework for utilizing conversational agents to promote acquisition of intercultural communication skills. Adaptation plays an important and increasing role, in creating courses that are adapted to the needs of particular learners, as well as pedagogic agents that adapt to the skills of the learner and the conversational context. In our current work we are developing agents with explicit models of culture, which may be used to create agents with adaptable levels of intercultural sensitivity. This makes it possible to adapt practice scenarios to the skills of the individual learner.