Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Dialogue systems have been used as conversation partners in English learning, but few have studied whether these systems improve learning outcomes.Student passion and perseverance, or grit, has been associated with language learning success.Recent work establishes that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves.Hypothesizing that the same pattern applies to Englishteaching chatbots, we create EDEN, a robust open-domain chatbot for spoken conversation practice that provides empathetic feedback.To construct EDEN, we first train a specialized spoken utterance grammar correction model and a high-quality social chit-chat conversation model.We then conduct a preliminary user study with a variety of strategies for empathetic feedback.Our experiment suggests that using adaptive empathetic feedback leads to higher perceived affective support.Furthermore, elements of perceived affective support positively correlate with student grit.
Authors: Siyan Li, Teresa Shao, Zhou Yu, Julia Hirschberg
Institution: Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4404782411