Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring

Jakub Macina, Nico Daheim, Lingzhi Wang, Tanmay Sinha, Manu Kapur, Iryna Gurevych, Mrinmaya Sachan


Abstract
Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large language models and growth in available dialog corpora, dialog tutoring has largely remained unaffected by these advances. In this paper, we rigorously analyze various generative language models on two dialog tutoring datasets for language learning using automatic and human evaluations to understand the new opportunities brought by these advances as well as the challenges we must overcome to build models that would be usable in real educational settings. We find that although current approaches can model tutoring in constrained learning scenarios when the number of concepts to be taught and possible teacher strategies are small, they perform poorly in less constrained scenarios. Our human quality evaluation shows that both models and ground-truth annotations exhibit low performance in terms of equitable tutoring, which measures learning opportunities for students and how engaging the dialog is. To understand the behavior of our models in a real tutoring setting, we conduct a user study using expert annotators and find a significantly large number of model reasoning errors in 45% of conversations. Finally, we connect our findings to outline future work.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.173
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2357–2372
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.173
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.173
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jakub Macina, Nico Daheim, Lingzhi Wang, Tanmay Sinha, Manu Kapur, Iryna Gurevych, and Mrinmaya Sachan. 2023. Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2357–2372, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring (Macina et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.173.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.173.mp4