Leveraging Unstructured Text Within the Context of Conversational Agents

We propose exploring alternative designs for a conversational agent developed as a tool to provide feedback within the education domain for pre-service teachers, students pursuing their teaching certificate, to practice their questioning skills in a given scenario. We utilize a component-based approach in the design of our conversational agent and this research focuses on proposing methods within the knowledge base component specifically leveraging unstructured text as the foundation of the knowledge base. Through leveraging unstructured text we intend to explore the possibilities of improving conversational agent response quality while minimizing resources required of domain experts in scenario development.