Interaction Matters: An Evaluation Framework for Interactive Dialogue Assessment on English Second Language Conversations

Rena Gao, Carsten Roever, Jey Han Lau


Abstract
We present an evaluation framework for interactive dialogue assessment in the context of English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers. Our framework collects dialogue-level interactivity labels (e.g., topic management; 4 labels in total) and micro-level span features (e.g., backchannels; 17 features in total). Given our annotated data, we study how the micro-level features influence the (higher level) interactivity quality of ESL dialogues by constructing various machine learning-based models. Our results demonstrate that certain micro-level features strongly correlate with interactivity quality, like reference words (e.g., she, her, he), revealing new insights about the interaction between higher-level dialogue quality and lower-level fundamental linguistic signals. Our framework also provides a means to assess ESL communication, which is useful for language assessment.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.729
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:
10977–11012
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.729/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rena Gao, Carsten Roever, and Jey Han Lau. 2025. Interaction Matters: An Evaluation Framework for Interactive Dialogue Assessment on English Second Language Conversations. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10977–11012, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interaction Matters: An Evaluation Framework for Interactive Dialogue Assessment on English Second Language Conversations (Gao et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.729.pdf