Are We There Yet? - A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education

By S. Wollny, J. Schneider, Daniele Di Mitri, J. Weidlich, Marc Rittberger, Hendrik Drachsler. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2021

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Chatbots are a promising technology with the potential to enhance workplaces and everyday life. In terms of scalability and accessibility, they also offer unique possibilities as communication and information tools for digital learning. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review investigating the areas of education where chatbots have already been applied, explore the pedagogical roles of chatbots, the use of chatbots for mentoring purposes, and their potential to personalize education. We conducted a preliminary analysis of 2,678 publications to perform this literature review, which allowed us to identify 74 relevant publications for chatbots’ application in education. Through this, we address five research questions that, together, allow us to explore the current state-of-the-art of this educational technology. We conclude our systematic review by pointing to three main research challenges: 1) Aligning chatbot evaluations with implementation objectives, 2) Exploring the potential of chatbots for mentoring students, and 3) Exploring and leveraging adaptation capabilities of chatbots. For all three challenges, we discuss opportunities for future research.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science Applications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81fcfb2f406bfcc352561d244fc249fd049dd20f

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Citations in the corpus

Will ChatGPT get you caught? Rethinking of Plagiarism Detection (2023, background): “According to a recent literature review conducted by Wollny and his colleagues [22], chatbots have been majorly used for supporting skill improvement and increasing the efficiency of education by automating some tasks, while their pedagogical role has been mostly to teach content/skill or assisting…”
Engineering Education in the Era of ChatGPT: Promise and Pitfalls of Generative AI for Education (2023, background): “There have been a number of studies that have explored the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education [15], including the use of chatbots [16] and other NLP tools [17].”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Student Assistants in the Classroom: Designing Chatbots to Support Student Success (2022, background): “In a recent literature review of 74 papers, Wollny et al. (2021) found that over 50% of chatbots in education were focused on teaching a new language.”
Practical and ethical challenges of large language models in education: A systematic scoping review (2023, background): “…reviews have focused on investigating these issues related to one speciﬁc application scenario of LLMs-based innovations (e.g., question generation, essay scoring, chatbots, or automated feedback) (Kurdi et al., 2020; Cavalcanti et al., 2021; Wollny et al., 2021; Ramesh and Sanampudi, 2022).”
New Era of Artificial Intelligence in Education: Towards a Sustainable Multifaceted Revolution (2023, background): “A recent survey found that the use of chatbots in education has been steadily increasing [4].”
Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review (2022, background): “…found out that chat-bots motivate students, keep them engaged, and grant them immediate assistance, Field of application (Winkler & Söllner, 2018; Wollny et al., 2021; Hwang & Chang, 2021; Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020) Objectives and learning experiences (Winkler & Söllner, 2018;…”