EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English learning
This work addresses English learners by potentially enhancing their grit through empathetic chatbots, but it is incremental as it builds on known links between teacher support and grit.
The authors tackled the problem of improving English learning outcomes by developing EDEN, an empathetic chatbot for conversation practice, and found that adaptive empathetic feedback increased perceived affective support, which positively correlated with student grit.
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.