Dialogue act recognition is the task of classifying conversational utterances based on their communicative intent or function. To address this problem, we propose a novel two-phase processing approach called Dual-Process Masking. This approach streamlines the task by masking less important tokens in the input, identified through retrospective analysis of their estimated contribution during training. It enhances interpretability by using the masks applied during classification learning. Dual-Process Masking significantly improves performance over strong baselines for dialogue act recognition on a collaborative problem-solving dataset and three public dialogue benchmarks.

The practice of soliciting self-explanations from students is widely recognized for its pedagogical benefits. However, the labor-intensive effort required to manually assess students’ explanations makes it impractical for classroom settings. As a result, many current solutions to gauge students’ understanding during class are often limited to multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank questions, which are less effective at exposing misconceptions or helping students to understand and integrate new concepts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to assess student explanations in real-time, making explanation-based classroom response systems feasible for implementation. In this work, we investigate LLM-based approaches for assessing the correctness of students’ explanations in response to undergraduate computer science questions. We investigate alternative prompting approaches for multiple LLMs (i.e., Llama 2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) and compare their performance to FLAN-T5 models trained in a fine-tuning manner. The results suggest that the highest accuracy and weighted F1 score were achieved by fine-tuning FLAN-T5, while an in-context learning approach with GPT-4 attains the highest macro F1 score.

Recognizing classroom dialogue acts has significant promise for yielding insight into teaching, student learning, and classroom dynamics. However, obtaining K-12 classroom dialogue data with labels is a significant challenge, and therefore, developing data-efficient methods for classroom dialogue act recognition is essential. This work addresses the challenge of classroom dialogue act recognition from limited labeled data using a contrastive learning-based self-supervised approach (SSCon). SSCon uses two independent models that iteratively improve each other’s performance by increasing the accuracy of dialogue act recognition and minimizing the embedding distance between the same dialogue acts. We evaluate the approach on three complementary dialogue act recognition datasets: the TalkMoves dataset (annotated K-12 mathematics lesson transcripts), the DailyDialog dataset (multi-turn daily conversation dialogues), and the Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 2 (DSTC2) dataset (restaurant reservation dialogues). Results indicate that our self-supervised contrastive learning-based model outperforms competitive baseline models when trained with limited examples per dialogue act. Furthermore, SSCon outperforms other few-shot models that require considerably more labeled data.

Accurate detection and appropriate handling of disruptive talk in multi-party dialogue is essential for users to achieve shared goals. In collaborative game-based learning environments, detecting and attending to disruptive talk holds significant potential since it can cause distraction and produce negative learning experiences for students. We present a novel attention-based user-aware neural architecture for disruptive talk detection that uses a sequence dropout-based regularization mechanism. The disruptive talk detection models are evaluated with multi-party dialogue collected from 72 middle school students who interacted with a collaborative game-based learning environment. Our proposed disruptive talk detection model significantly outperforms competitive baseline approaches and shows significant potential for helping to support effective collaborative learning experiences.