Li Siyan


2024

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Using Adaptive Empathetic Responses for Teaching English
Li Siyan | Teresa Shao | Julia Hirschberg | 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.