EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces EDEN, an empathetic chatbot designed for spoken English practice that enhances learners' perceived support and potentially improves their grit, a key factor in language learning success.

Contribution

The paper presents EDEN, a novel empathetic dialogue system for English learning that combines grammar correction and social chat, and demonstrates its positive impact on perceived support and grit.

Findings

Adaptive empathetic feedback increases perceived affective support.

Perceived affective support correlates positively with student grit.

EDEN's design improves conversational support for language learners.

Abstract

Dialogue systems have been used as conversation partners in English learning, but few have studied whether these systems improve learning outcomes. Student passion and perseverance, or grit, has been associated with language learning success. Recent work establishes that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. Hypothesizing that the same pattern applies to English-teaching chatbots, we create EDEN, a robust open-domain chatbot for spoken conversation practice that provides empathetic feedback. To construct EDEN, we first train a specialized spoken utterance grammar correction model and a high-quality social chit-chat conversation model. We then conduct a preliminary user study with a variety of strategies for empathetic feedback. Our experiment suggests that using adaptive empathetic feedback leads to higher perceived affective support. Furthermore, elements of perceived affective support positively correlate with student grit.