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Showing posts from October, 2021

Plans for Revision

 As I move into the revising phase, I have a lot of work to do. I did not dedicate as much time and effort as I would have liked to my literature review and I believe I can improve on that work quite a bit. For my lit review, I want to focus more on the sources that I collected and read than I did previously and establish how they connect with one another and relate to my topic better.  For my research proposal, I am focusing on a usability study. As I stated in my previous blog post there is actually a good amount of research regarding how to better program chatbot technology and research which focuses on the potential of chatbots. In spite of this, there is relatively no research that a) explores the current importance and influence of chatbots in everyday life -- mainly mainstream consumerism-- and b) user satisfaction of chatbot users among different sociolinguistic demographics.  With my research proposal-- and eventually my research itself-- I intend to address this...

Research Gap

While completing my literature review I noticed that my topic of choice is relatively unexplored. I could not find much research on the consumer aspect of chatbots. There were a few articles considering the effectiveness of chatbots as a tool for second language learning and a handful of sources that examined the programming behind chatbots and their use of AAVE. As far as understanding how usability is affected by dialect, however, I couldn't find a single source. The closest that I could find was a study that investigated the effect of language register on chatbot usability. Overall, the sources that I reviewed were all beneficial but not directly related to my topic. Therefore, more research needs to be done to determine how chatbots are more or less helpful to someone based on their language dialect. For my study, I hope to conduct a usability study with people of three separate English dialects to gain a better understanding of how chatbots can be improved.