Teaching Dialogue to Interdisciplinary Teams through Toolkits

We present some lessons we have learned from using software infrastructure to support coursework in natural language dialogue and embodied conversational agents. We have a new appreciation for the differences between coursework and research infrastructure---supporting teaching may be harder, because students require a broader spectrum of implementation, a faster learning curve and the ability to explore mistaken ideas as well as promising ones. We outline the collaborative discussion and effort we think is required to create better teaching infrastructure in the future.

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