A Cognitive Dialogue Manager for Education Purposes

A conversational agent is a software system that is able to interact with users in a natural way, and often uses natural language capabilities. In this chapter, an evolution of a conversational agent is pre- sented according to the definition of dialogue management techniques for the conversational agents. The presented conversational agent is intended to act as a part of an educational system. The chapter outlines the state-of-the-art systems and techniques for dialogue management in cognitive educational systems, and the underlying psychological and social aspects. We present our framework for a dialogue manager aimed to reduce the uncertainty in users’ sentences during the assessment of his/her requests. The domain is the development of a new generation of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) enabled with meta-cognitive abilities to make the learning process more effective. The architecture of the developed systems is explained in detail, along with some experimental results, and a possible vision for the future of these systems is presented.