sequence is two turns of conversation and that the
sequences composed of more turns are expansions,
which can produce an assessment of conversation,
positive or not, in the third round (Koschmann, 2013).
To identify questioning, Lu et al. (2011) propose that
this is a type of statement that seeks factual
information, including words such as “what”,
“which”, “where” and “when”, or one that seeks
explanation, including words such as “why” and
“how”. To identify questions, the Linguistic Inquiry
and Word Count (LIWC) software package, which is
based on empirical research, can be used to extract
word counts indicative of different psychological
processes, such as affective, cognitive, social and
perceptual (Farrow et al., 2019). Its core is based on
a lexical resource, called the LIWC dictionary, which
is also available in Portuguese (Cavalcanti et al.,
2020).
The quality of engagement in educational tasks is
measured by the number of responses to posts, and
not by the number of posts initiated by an individual
student, that is, responses demonstrate engagement
(Lyndall & Elspeth, 2015). The number of debating
students also influences the quality of their
interactions, ideally being organized in small groups,
ranging from 3 to 6 participants, which positively
impacts the value of the discussions (Saqr et al.,
2019). Social Network Analysis (SNA) makes it
possible to record the number of interactions among
students as an indicator of quality in collaboration.
The use of SNA has played a prominent role in the
analysis of learning in order to indicate collaborative
learning (Dascalu et al., 2018). It is also important to
note that the benefit of measuring the quality of
collaboration for individual students is the
recognition of their proactive and effective
collaboration (Lyndall & Elspeth, 2015).
Regarding topic detection, the repetition of
keywords in statements by different students is an
indicator of which topics are under discussion
(Allaymoun & Trausan-Matu, 2015). To this end,
topic modeling, a text mining tool frequently used to
discovery hidden semantic structures in a corpus, can
be adopted to identify keywords in student
statements. Based on this identification, Epistemic
Network Analysis (ENA) combined with SNA can
detect information about the student performance in
the perspective of identifying a set of cognitive and
social dimensions, which is marked by interaction
with the appropriate people on the appropriate content
(Farrow et al., 2019).
Some collaborative learning factors relevant to
chatbot performance are characterized regarding the
effectiveness of immediate feedback, more
appropriate in verbal learning tasks, and delayed
feedback, advantageous in learning concepts because
it allows more time for students’ metacognition;
being careful not to interrupt or disturb when there are
interactions among students during their learning
activities; and the benefit more focused on
interactions among students than on their learning
performance (Hayashi, 2019).
Hayashi (2019) implemented the following three-
steps chatbot structure: (1) two chatbots were
designed to facilitate requests based on types of
functions: the communication consultant to answer
about the efficiency of communication and the tutor
of explanations to generate answers on how to think
about a topic that triggers metacognition; (2) the
system detected keywords in an inserted sentence and
classifies them by type; (3) the system generates
responses based on detected keywords and number of
turns taken in conversation. Each chatbot, therefore,
responded to students when it detected any of the
keywords, whether they are related to important
phrases or communication problems (Hayashi, 2019).
Classification processes have been implemented
through machine learning algorithms, which is a sub-
field of AI capable of recognizing patterns, making
predictions and applying newly discovered patterns in
situations that were not initially included or covered.
Zawacki-Richter et al. (2019) identified, in a review
of 58 studies in this area, that all of them applied
machine learning methods to recognize and classify
patterns and model student profiles. To evaluate the
accuracy of classifiers, the authors used statistical
measures that demonstrated their high ability to
predict the performance in a student group from
participating in online discussion.
With regard to recommendation systems,
Chatbots can play an effective role in distance
education, having been identified as an ET that may
contribute to the acceleration of the learning process,
facilitate access to educational contents and enrich the
learning environment by supporting students and
teachers (Liu et al., 2019). It is also relevant to
highlight that in knowledge-based recommendation
systems, recommendations are suggested based on
the specified requirements, and not on the learner’s
interaction history (Aggarwal, 2016).
Chatbot intervention strategies can be defined
based on the Academically Productive Talk (APT)
structure, designed to encourage discussion in an
educational context from social interaction to the
construction of mental processes, with an emphasis
on valuable interaction (Tegos et al., 2020). APT
proposes tools to be adopted by the teacher in order
to encourage discussion in the classroom in which