The Study of the Application of a Keywords-based Chatbot System on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

This paper reports the findings of a study conducted on the application of an on-line human-computer dialog system with natural language (chatbot) on the teaching of foreign languages. A keywords-based human-computer dialog system makes it possible that the user could chat with the computer using a natural language, i.e. in English or in German to some extent. So an experiment has been made using this system online to work as a chat partner with the users learning the foreign languages. Dialogs between the users and the chatbot are collected. Findings indicate that the dialogs between the human and the computer are mostly very short because the user finds the responses from the computer are mostly repeated and irrelevant with the topics and context and the program doesn’t understand the language at all. With analysis of the keywords or pattern-matching mechanism used in this chatbot it can be concluded that this kind of system can not work as a teaching assistant program in foreign language learning.