A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF CHATBOT APPLICATION PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS

Abstract

The application of chatbots in education is an emerging study with the potential to facilitate remote education paradigms and empower students with the flexibility to study at their desired time and location. The existing studies rarely take a perspective of chatbot application principles to explore teaching design in educational contexts. To bridge this research gap, this study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis through visualization and citation network analyses. We find that intelligent chatbots in education continue to attract increasing attention due to technological improvement and diversification of teaching means. This study pinpoints prevalent research topics about chatbots in educational applications, including strategies for designing chatbots, users’ expectations, the contrast between human-human and human-chatbot partners, and motivations, etc. Due to its insufficient study on the application principles of chatbots in the process of education, the study provides a model and specifies some key variables used for future studies on chatbot application principles in educational contexts.