Team

A panel featuring all three research units was held at the International SHAI Conference in Naples to present UNITE’s current initiatives and future objectives.

Updates on the UNITE corpus were presented at the 7th International Learner Corpus Research Conference in Tartu.

Insights from the UNITE project were discussed at the 3rd International ELT Conference in Ferrara.

Updates on UNITE were presented at the 16th Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Manchester.

Preliminary results from UNITE were presented at the IX DILLE congress in Matera. 

University of Napoli "L'Orientale": the first experimental session with students was carried out online, through Microsoft Teams. It involved students from the Political Science and Archeology departments. 

University of Bologna: the first experimental session with students was carried out at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus)

University of Macerata: the first experimental session with students was carried out at the Department of Primary Education Sciences.

A survey about existing chatbots was carried out among students of the University of Bologna to investigate their prior knowledge on chatbots and conversational agents.

The tasks to be carried out by each student throughout the test were defined and detailed instructions for participants were prepared.

A questionnaire for students’ assessment and opinions about the interaction with the chatbots was drafted and fine-tuned.

A completed version of the experimental protocol was drafted to define the procedures to be followed during the experimental sessions.

Methods for the recruitment of volunteering students were discussed.

An array of existing chatbots was drafted, in order to select the chatbots that will be taken into consideration throughout the experimental sessions.

Procedures for the anonymization of collected data were defined.

Several existing chatbots were pinpointed and tested, in order to edit a comprehensive list of the ones available at the present day.

Research gaps in previous literature were identified.

Privacy and bioethics matters and committees were defined.

Bibliographical references for the systematic review were collected and classified.

The UNITE project was launched.