Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse

Jie Cao, Abhijit Suresh, Jennifer Jacobs, Charis Clevenger, Amanda Howard, Chelsea Brown, Brent Milne, Tom Fischaber, Tamara Sumner, James H. Martin


Abstract
Human tutoring interventions play a crucial role in supporting student learning, improving academic performance, and promoting personal growth. This paper focuses on analyzing mathematics tutoring discourse using talk moves—a framework of dialogue acts grounded in Accountable Talk theory. However, scaling the collection, annotation, and analysis of extensive tutoring dialogues to develop machine learning models is a challenging and resource-intensive task. To address this, we present SAGA22, a compact dataset, and explore various modeling strategies, including dialogue context, speaker information, pretraining datasets, and further fine-tuning. By leveraging existing datasets and models designed for classroom teaching, our results demonstrate that supplementary pretraining on classroom data enhances model performance in tutoring settings, particularly when incorporating longer context and speaker information. Additionally, we conduct extensive ablation studies to underscore the challenges in talk move modeling.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.513
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7671–7684
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.513/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jie Cao, Abhijit Suresh, Jennifer Jacobs, Charis Clevenger, Amanda Howard, Chelsea Brown, Brent Milne, Tom Fischaber, Tamara Sumner, and James H. Martin. 2025. Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7671–7684, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse (Cao et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.513.pdf