More Insightful Feedback for Tutoring: Enhancing Generation Mechanisms and Automatic Evaluation

Wencke Liermann, Jin-Xia Huang, Yohan Lee, Kong Joo Lee


Abstract
Incorrect student answers can become valuable learning opportunities, provided that the student understands where they went wrong and why. To this end, rather than being given the correct answer, students should receive elaborated feedback on how to correct a mistake on their own. Highlighting the complex demands that the generation of such feedback places on a model’s input utilization abilities, we propose two extensions to the training pipeline. Firstly, we employ a KL regularization term between a standard and enriched input format to achieve more targeted input representations. Secondly, we add a preference optimization step to encourage student answer-adaptive feedback generation. The effectiveness of those extensions is underlined by a significant increase in model performance of 3.3 METEOR points. We go beyond traditional surface form-based metrics to assess two important dimensions of feedback quality, i.e., faithfulness and informativeness. Hereby, we are the first to propose an automatic metric measuring the degree to which feedback divulges the correct answer, that we call Informativeness Index I2. We verify in how far each metric captures feedback quality.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.605
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:
10838–10851
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.605
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wencke Liermann, Jin-Xia Huang, Yohan Lee, and Kong Joo Lee. 2024. More Insightful Feedback for Tutoring: Enhancing Generation Mechanisms and Automatic Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10838–10851, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
More Insightful Feedback for Tutoring: Enhancing Generation Mechanisms and Automatic Evaluation (Liermann et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.605.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.605.software.zip