“Communication” in Learners’ Interaction with Chatbots in Undergraduate Linguistic Courses in Egypt

People all over the world communicate with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate job tasks. Learners also communicate with different chatbots to facilitate their learning process. However, learners sometimes suffer from irrelevant and inaccurate responses given by chatbots. The purpose of this article is to report on a preliminary experience of different interactions performed in Fall 2023 between beginner AI users in two linguistic courses taught by the researcher to first- and fourth-year students of the English Department in one of the Egyptian private universities and different chatbots and analyze these interactions within the framework of the pragmatic relevance theory. Two research questions were posed in the study; one related to the user’s prompts and the other related to the AI responses: (1) How far do learners manifest relevant prompts while communicating with chatbots, and (2) To what extent do chatbots provide relevant responses? These questions were answered qualitatively to account for (ir)relevance of prompts and responses and quantitatively using the F1 score formula. Findings revealed that to get relevant responses from chatbots, the prompts should be on the “determinate pure telling” end of the relevance/irrelevance continuum, that is represented by “explicatures with no implicatures” with only one clear single proposition. The study is one of the prior applications of AI within the framework of linguistic theories.