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Department Brown Bag Lunch Seminars: Dr Chiara Gambi, University of Warwick

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Location: H1.49 - Humanities Building

Title: What makes a conversation interesting? Insights from a corpus of chat-based interactions between teachers and learners of English.

 

Abstract:

Stimulating language learners’ interest and engagement is essential to successful second language acquisition, but it can be hard to translate this intuition into effective learning resources. We carried out the first quantitative investigation into the linguistic and pragmatic features that make an educational conversation interesting. To do so, we collected a new corpus of human interest ratings for conversations between teachers and second language learners of English. Using this corpus, we showed that concreteness, comprehensibility (assessed via a new computational metric, the GIS score) and uptake (i.e., the degree to which a teacher and a student’s turn build on one another) all have unique relations to interest. This provides proof of concept that - despite the high degree of subjectivity involved in perceptions of interest - it is possible to extract features that make a conversation interesting for the average learner. We also showed that - when a new topic is introduced in a conversation - raters judge the corresponding turn as being more interesting than they expected, suggesting a role for expectations in determining interest. Finally, we evaluated the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human ratings of conversational interest, and showed that - while the task is difficult for all models - those models that are fine-tuned on human preferences do better than those that are not. These findings provide insights into what makes for interesting conversations between teachers and second-language learners of English, and lay the foundations for future work on the optimization of LLMs for more engaging language learning interactions.

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