Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Zhengyuan Liu, Stella Yin, Geyu Lin, Nancy Chen


Abstract
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can provide personalized and self-paced learning experience. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enables better human-machine interaction, and facilitates the development of conversational ITSs in various disciplines such as math and language learning. In dialogic teaching, recognizing and adapting to individual characteristics can significantly enhance student engagement and learning efficiency. However, characterizing and simulating student’s persona remain challenging in training and evaluating conversational ITSs. In this work, we propose a framework to construct profiles of different student groups by refining and integrating both cognitive and noncognitive aspects, and leverage LLMs for personality-aware student simulation in a language learning scenario. We further enhance the framework with multi-aspect validation, and conduct extensive analysis from both teacher and student perspectives. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can produce diverse student responses according to the given language ability and personality traits, and trigger teacher’s adaptive scaffolding strategies.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.37
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
626–642
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.37
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengyuan Liu, Stella Yin, Geyu Lin, and Nancy Chen. 2024. Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 626–642, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Liu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.37.pdf