Tutorbot corpus:evidence of Human-Agent verbal alignment in Second Language learner dialogues
Arabella Sinclair, Katherine McCurdy, Christopher Lucas, Adam Lopez, Dragan Gašević · Monash University Research Portal (Monash University) · 2019
Prior research has shown that, under certain conditions, Human-Agent (H-A) alignment exists to a stronger degree than that found in Human-Human (H-H) communication. In an H-H Second Language (L2) setting, evidence of alignment has been linked to learning and teaching strategy. We present a novel analysis of H-A and H-H L2 learner dialogues using automated metrics of alignment. Our contributions are twofold: firstly we replicated the reported H-A alignment within an educational context, finding L2 students align to an automated tutor. Secondly, we performed an exploratory comparison of the alignment present in comparable H-A and H-H L2 learner corpora using Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), finding preliminary evidence that students in H-A L2 dialogues showed greater variability in engagement.