Book2Dial: Generating Teacher Student Interactions from Textbooks for Cost-Effective Development of Educational Chatbots
Junling Wang, Jakub Mačina, Nico Daheim, Sankalan Pal Chowdhury, Mrinmaya Sachan · 2024
Educational chatbots are a promising tool for assisting student learning.However, developing effective chatbots in education has been challenging, as high-quality data is seldom available in this domain.In this paper, we propose a framework for generating synthetic teacher-student interactions grounded in a set of textbooks.Our approaches capture one aspect of learning interactions where curious students with partial knowledge interactively ask a teacher questions about the material in the textbook.We highlight various quality criteria such dialogues should fulfill and compare several approaches relying on either prompting or fine-tuning large language models.We use synthetic dialogues to train educational chatbots and show the benefits of further fine-tuning in different educational domains.However, human evaluation shows that our best data synthesis method still suffers from hallucinations and tends to reiterate information from previous conversations.Our findings offer insights for future efforts in synthesizing conversational data that strikes a balance between size and quality.