Using a Conversational Agent to Facilitate Non-native Speaker's Active Participation in Conversation

When a non-native speaker talks with a native speaker, he/she sometimes feels hard to take speaking turns due to language proficiency. The resulting conversation between a non-native speaker and a native speaker is not always productive. In this paper, we propose a conversational agent to support a non-native speaker in his/her second language conversation. The agent joins the conversation and makes intervention by a simple script based on turn-taking rules for taking the agent's turn, and gives the next turn to the non-native speaker for prompting him/her to speak. Evaluation of the proposed agent suggested that it successfully facilitated the non-native speaker's participation over 30% of the agent's interventions, and significantly increased the frequency of turn-taking.