ABSTRACT
A nimated conversational agents play a central role in some visions of advanced learning environments. Imagine a virtual world that has a close correspondence with everyday scenarios and problems, with human-like cyber agents that interact with students and help them learn by holding a conversation in natural language. The cyber agents may take on different roles: mentors, tutors, peers, players in multiparty games, or avatars in the virtual worlds. The students communicate with the agents through speech, keyboard, gesture, touch-panel screen, or conventional input channels. In turn, the agents express themselves with speech, facial expression, gesture, posture, and other embodied actions. In essence, students and agents have face-to-face conversations in the context of authentic situations and problems. The students are highly engaged in their interactions with the agents in the virtual worlds because the system dynamically adapts to their cognitive, emotional, and motivational states. The entire system is also embedded in a game environment in which the students score points to the extent that their speech and actions reect mastery of the material. These are serious games-games that help the students acquire important academic and technical content.
