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.