Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Towards A Human-in-the-Loop LLM Approach to Collaborative Discourse Analysis

Project Overview

The document examines the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4-Turbo, in the educational sector, focusing on their role in analyzing collaborative discourse among high school students within STEM+C learning environments. It highlights a human-in-the-loop methodology that aims to deepen insights into students' synergistic learning experiences in subjects like physics and computing through automated discourse analysis. Preliminary findings indicate that LLMs can effectively characterize collaborative discourse similarly to human evaluators, showcasing their capability to identify complex discourse categories. However, the document also addresses certain limitations of LLMs, such as the occurrence of hallucinations and challenges related to contextual integration. Overall, the findings suggest that while LLMs present significant potential for enhancing educational discourse analysis, careful consideration of their limitations is essential for effective implementation in educational settings.

Key Applications

Human-in-the-loop LLM approach for discourse analysis

Context: High school students (aged 14-15) learning kinematics in a collaborative environment

Implementation: Used GPT-4-Turbo to summarize and categorize students' collaborative discourse during model-building tasks in a C2STEM curriculum

Outcomes: LLM-generated summaries were comparable to human-generated summaries, providing detailed insights into students' problem-solving processes and identifying when teacher assistance may be needed.

Challenges: LLMs can struggle with contextual integration and may produce hallucinations, misclassifying discourse segments.

Implementation Barriers

Technical barrier

LLMs can generate hallucinations that propagate errors in discourse analysis, impacting the quality of summaries. Additionally, there is a limited ability of LLMs to integrate environmental actions and temporal dynamics into discourse analysis.

Proposed Solutions: Implementing a human-in-the-loop approach to validate and refine LLM outputs, ensuring context and accuracy. Enhancing prompts to include more contextual information and utilizing prosodic audio data to capture nuances in student discourse.

Project Team

Clayton Cohn

Researcher

Caitlin Snyder

Researcher

Justin Montenegro

Researcher

Gautam Biswas

Researcher

Contact Information

For information about the paper, please contact the authors.

Authors: Clayton Cohn, Caitlin Snyder, Justin Montenegro, Gautam Biswas

Source Publication: View Original PaperLink opens in a new window

Project Contact: Dr. Jianhua Yang

LLM Model Version: gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18

Analysis Provider: Openai

Let us know you agree to cookies