Teresa Shao
2024
EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English Learning
Siyan Li
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Teresa Shao
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Zhou Yu
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Julia Hirschberg
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Dialogue systems have been used as conversation partners in English learning, but few have studied whether these systems improve learning outcomes. Student passion and perseverance, or grit, has been associated with language learning success. Recent work establishes that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. Hypothesizing that the same pattern applies to English-teaching chatbots, we create EDEN, a robust open-domain chatbot for spoken conversation practice that provides empathetic feedback. To construct EDEN, we first train a specialized spoken utterance grammar correction model and a high-quality social chit-chat conversation model. We then conduct a preliminary user study with a variety of strategies for empathetic feedback. Our experiment suggests that using adaptive empathetic feedback leads to higher *perceived affective support*. Furthermore, elements of perceived affective support positively correlate with student grit.
Using Adaptive Empathetic Responses for Teaching English
Li Siyan
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Teresa Shao
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Julia Hirschberg
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Zhou Yu
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.