Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a conversational agent (chatbot) for Hindi-speaking youth called BELA—Bot for English Language Acquisition. Developed for young underprivileged students at an Indian non-profit, the agent supports both Hindi and Hinglish (code-switched Hindi and English, written primarily with English orthography) utterances. BELA has two interaction modes: a question-answering mode for classic English language learning tasks like word meanings, translations, reading passage comprehensions, etc., and an open-domain dialogue system mode to allow users to practice their language skills. We present a high-level overview of the design of BELA, including the implementation details and the preliminary results of our early prototype. We also report the challenges in creating an English-language learning chatbot for a largely Hindi-speaking population.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nlp4pi-1.17
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
- Editors:
- Laura Biester, Dorottya Demszky, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Lu Xiao, Jieyu Zhao
- Venue:
- NLP4PI
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 142–148
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4pi-1.17
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.nlp4pi-1.17
- Cite (ACL):
- Muskan Mahajan. 2022. BELA: Bot for English Language Acquisition. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 142–148, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- BELA: Bot for English Language Acquisition (Mahajan, NLP4PI 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.nlp4pi-1.17.pdf