Problem-Oriented Segmentation and Retrieval: Case Study on Tutoring Conversations

Rose Wang, Pawan Wirawarn, Kenny Lam, Omar Khattab, Dorottya Demszky


Abstract
Many open-ended conversations (e.g., tutoring lessons or business meetings) revolve around pre-defined reference materials, like worksheets or meeting bullets. To provide a framework for studying such conversation structure, we introduce *Problem-Oriented Segmentation & Retrieval (POSR), the task of jointly breaking down conversations into segments and linking each segment to the relevant reference item. As a case study, we apply POSR to education where effectively structuring lessons around problems is critical yet difficult. We present *LessonLink*, the first dataset of real-world tutoring lessons, featuring 3,500 segments, spanning 24,300 minutes of instruction and linked to 116 SAT Math problems. We define and evaluate several joint and independent approaches for POSR, including segmentation (e.g., TextTiling), retrieval (e.g., ColBERT), and large language models (LLMs) methods. Our results highlight that modeling POSR as one joint task is essential: POSR methods outperform independent segmentation and retrieval pipelines by up to +76% on joint metrics and surpass traditional segmentation methods by up to +78% on segmentation metrics. We demonstrate POSR’s practical impact on downstream education applications, deriving new insights on the language and time use in real-world lesson structures.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.740
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12654–12672
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.740
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rose Wang, Pawan Wirawarn, Kenny Lam, Omar Khattab, and Dorottya Demszky. 2024. Problem-Oriented Segmentation and Retrieval: Case Study on Tutoring Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12654–12672, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Problem-Oriented Segmentation and Retrieval: Case Study on Tutoring Conversations (Wang et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.740.pdf
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