Building an Interactive Agent with Intention to Increase Students´ Learning Will

Intention is an important factor to drive human behavior. With a certain intention, an action becomes more natural and reasonable. In this paper, an agent with intention, which not only possesses facial expressions, hand gestures, body motions, but also holds memory and personality, is presented. The agent exploits the social dialogue to show intention and its care for students in a learning system. The agent will purposefully guide students in the learning process, care about their needs during learning, provide empathy feedback in order to lessen their negative emotions, and offer appropriate reproach or encouragement to help them overcome the obstacles to English learning. A preliminary experiment will be done to show that this agent can interact with students more naturally and meanwhile strengthen their will to learn as well as make them more willing to accept the opinions from the agent.