Muskan Mahajan
2022
BELA: Bot for English Language Acquisition
Muskan Mahajan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Muskan Mahajan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
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.