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ALICE and AIML for ESL

The fact is that there are more people in the world who want to learn English as a Second Language than there are native speakers available to teach them, even if every native English speaker became a professional teacher. Even then, they couldn't afford to pay us. The solution has to come from automation. Specifically, chat robots, a form of artificial intelligence created to mimic human-to-human online text based chat or instant messenging, have proved to be a safe, economical, and convenient tool for reducing the cost of teaching and practicing English conversation skills.

AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is a free, open source standard for creating chat bots like the DAVE ESL bot available from the ALICE A.I. Foundation (www.alicebot.org). Because of its open source approach, AIML is said by some to have captured more than 80% of the world market for chat bot technology. The design principle of AIML is minimalism. In theory, anyone who knows enough HTML to design a web page can learn enough AIML to begin creating a chat robot. ESL teachers themselves are not beyond learning how to train the very bots that their students will be using in future courses.

In fact the primary skill in bot training (being a botmaster) is not technical but literary, that is, being able to write creative, original, witty replies that keep the student engaged and interested in the bot's conversation. The art of being a botmaster is more like being a screenwriter creating a character, than being a computer programmer.

The data we use to train our bots comes from the student conversations themselves. As the ESL students use the bots more and more, we begin to collect a huge corpus of dialog data indicating the most common inputs, in rank frequency, that the students expect the bot to be able to answer. In designing the bot personality, the botmaster addresses these inputs in the order of most to least frequent.

• First and foremost is our own DAVE E.S.L. bot, created by the ALICE A. I. Foundation to meet the growing demand for bots to help people practise English as a Second Language.
• Among our freindly competitors, Speak2Me is one company you should know about. They use AIML and Oddcast.
• Also this company, English2Go, which is affliated with the Mexican edition of Reader's Digest, uses Pandorabots.
• One of the biggest portal sites is English as a Second Language . "Welcome to the English as a Second Language site, which is a starting point for ESL learners who want to learn English through the Web. The variety of materials will allow you to choose something appropriate for yourself."
• English Schools Foundation: Artificial Intelligence "As a project with over 300 contributors worldwide, A.L.I.C.E. has many stories. But some of the most interesting come from the originator of the project, Dr. Richard S. Wallace. Browse through this collection of articles to learn about how A.L.I.C.E. came to be, and how it fits in the larger context of artificial intelligence."
• Online Learning Games for ESL Kids "Talk To Alice: Alice is a robot that lives in a computer. You can have a conversation with her and test her artificial intelligence. Great fun for higher level kids and adults."
• Chris Fry's English_Chat | EFL ESL chat links | EFL ESL exercises "The idea of the group How to learn more English is to exchange suggestions about how to learn English. It will help people trying to learn English on their own and those going to English classes. Members can share suggestions about how to improve all aspects of English: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation."
• Teachers (mostly in Chinese)

	Web alicebot.org

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