Predicting Specificity in Classroom Discussion

Luca Lugini, Diane Litman


Abstract
High quality classroom discussion is important to student development, enhancing abilities to express claims, reason about other students’ claims, and retain information for longer periods of time. Previous small-scale studies have shown that one indicator of classroom discussion quality is specificity. In this paper we tackle the problem of predicting specificity for classroom discussions. We propose several methods and feature sets capable of outperforming the state of the art in specificity prediction. Additionally, we provide a set of meaningful, interpretable features that can be used to analyze classroom discussions at a pedagogical level.
Anthology ID:
W17-5006
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Joel Tetreault, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Helen Yannakoudakis
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
52–61
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5006
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5006
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luca Lugini and Diane Litman. 2017. Predicting Specificity in Classroom Discussion. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 52–61, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Specificity in Classroom Discussion (Lugini & Litman, BEA 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5006.pdf