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Main Authors: Mim, Farjana Sultana, Aeron, Shuchin, Miller, Eric, Wendell, Kristen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20547
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author Mim, Farjana Sultana
Aeron, Shuchin
Miller, Eric
Wendell, Kristen
author_facet Mim, Farjana Sultana
Aeron, Shuchin
Miller, Eric
Wendell, Kristen
contents Identifying discourse features in student conversations is quite important for educational researchers to recognize the curricular and pedagogical variables that cause students to engage in constructing knowledge rather than merely completing tasks. The manual analysis of student conversations to identify these discourse features is time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limits the scale and scope of studies. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques can facilitate the automatic detection of these discourse features, offering educational researchers scalable and data-driven insights. However, existing studies in NLP that focus on discourse in dialogue rarely address educational data. In this work, we address this gap by introducing an annotated educational dialogue dataset of student conversations featuring knowledge construction and task production discourse. We also establish baseline models for automatically predicting these discourse properties for each turn of talk within conversations, using pre-trained large language models GPT-3.5 and Llama-3.1. Experimental results indicate that these state-of-the-art models perform suboptimally on this task, indicating the potential for future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20547
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Words to Wisdom: Discourse Annotation and Baseline Models for Student Dialogue Understanding
Mim, Farjana Sultana
Aeron, Shuchin
Miller, Eric
Wendell, Kristen
Computation and Language
Identifying discourse features in student conversations is quite important for educational researchers to recognize the curricular and pedagogical variables that cause students to engage in constructing knowledge rather than merely completing tasks. The manual analysis of student conversations to identify these discourse features is time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limits the scale and scope of studies. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques can facilitate the automatic detection of these discourse features, offering educational researchers scalable and data-driven insights. However, existing studies in NLP that focus on discourse in dialogue rarely address educational data. In this work, we address this gap by introducing an annotated educational dialogue dataset of student conversations featuring knowledge construction and task production discourse. We also establish baseline models for automatically predicting these discourse properties for each turn of talk within conversations, using pre-trained large language models GPT-3.5 and Llama-3.1. Experimental results indicate that these state-of-the-art models perform suboptimally on this task, indicating the potential for future research.
title From Words to Wisdom: Discourse Annotation and Baseline Models for Student Dialogue Understanding
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20547