TUTORING: Instruction-Grounded Conversational Agent for Language Learners

TL;DR

This paper introduces Tutoring, a conversational agent trained on tutor-student dialogues that uses instructional grounding and multi-task learning to simulate human tutoring behavior for language learners.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel generative chatbot that integrates instructional grounding and multi-task learning to improve language tutoring interactions.

Findings

Effective in mimicking human tutor responses

Capable of inferring teaching actions and progress

Deployed for real-world language learning applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Tutoring bot, a generative chatbot trained on a large scale of tutor-student conversations for English-language learning. To mimic a human tutor's behavior in language education, the tutor bot leverages diverse educational instructions and grounds to each instruction as additional input context for the tutor response generation. As a single instruction generally involves multiple dialogue turns to give the student sufficient speaking practice, the tutor bot is required to monitor and capture when the current instruction should be kept or switched to the next instruction. For that, the tutor bot is learned to not only generate responses but also infer its teaching action and progress on the current conversation simultaneously by a multi-task learning scheme. Our Tutoring bot is deployed under a non-commercial use license at https://tutoringai.com.