11,294 research outputs found
Multimodal learning and teaching corpora exchange: Lessons learned in five years by the Mulce project
In order to make replication possible for interaction analysis in online learning, the French project named Mulce (2007-2010) and its team worked on requirements for research data to be shareable. We defined a learning and teaching corpus (LETEC) as a package containing the data issued from an online course, the contextual information and metadata, necessary to make these data visible, shareable and reusable. These human, technical and ethical requirements are presented in this paper. We briefly present the structure of a corpus and the repository we developed to share these corpora. Related works are also described and we show how conditions evolved between 2006 and 2011. This leads us to report on how the Mulce project was faced with four particular challenges and to suggest acceptable solutions for computer scientists and researchers in the humanities: both concerned by data sharing in the Technology Enhanced Learning community
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Supporting undergraduate students’ acquisition of academic argumentation strategies through computer conferencing
Executive Summary
Background
This research grows out of work on the importance of argumentation in developingstudents’ critical abilities. It focuses attention on how students argue in computer mediated conferences as opposed to traditionalwritten assignments, investigating the way in which argumentation is realised within the relatively new context of
computer conferencing which allows extended written discussions to take place overa period of weeks. Such text-based asynchronous conferencing is typically
characterised by features of both spoken and written modes.
Aims
The main aims of the project were:
• to investigate the argumentation strategies used in asynchronous text-based computer conferences;
• to compare the argumentation strategies developed through conferencing with those used in the writing of academic assignments;
• to examine the strategies used by tutors to encourage and facilitate argumentation in text-based computer conferences.
Methods
Data was collected over two years for the distance undergraduate course ‘Perspectives on Complementary and Alternative Medicine’ at the Open University.Qualitative data was obtained through interviews with the course chair, tutors and students, and through a student questionnaire. Assignments and computer-mediated
tutorials were collected for textual analysis, although the timing of the assignments meant that analysis has only just begun on the essay data. To analyse the argumentation in the computer conferences and assignments a method of
categorising, coding and tracking argumentative discourse was developed building on earlier work by the authors. In addition, computational searches were carried out to compare linguistic features across conference and assignment data.
Results
In tutorial conferences, student discussion tended to take the form of collaborative co-construction of an argument through exchanging information and experience to
substantiate a position. However, students were also prepared to challenge other viewpoints. In both cases, they frequently drew on personal and professional
experience to support argument claims. The use of these strategies suggests that text-based conferencing lends itself to the collective combining of diverse sources of
information, experiences and ideas.
Conference discussions were often personalised with fewer explicit logical links marking argument structure. They were also marked by complexity of argument strands, many of which reached no conclusion. Preliminary analysis of argumentation in assignments suggests that this did not, however, adversely affect students’ ability to create a more traditional, linear argument in their essays. Further analysis will be undertaken to compare argumentation strategies across the two sets of data. Tutors expressed concern about levels of participation in the tutorial conferences, which varied quite considerably. They also felt uncertain about their own knowledge of appropriate pedagogic strategies which would encourage students to participate in a collaborative yet critical way, and tended to rely on strategies from face-to-face teaching. Analysis of the conference discussion showed that tutors made fewer claims than students and were also less likely to provide information in support of their claims. There was, therefore, little modelling by tutors of the basic type of argumentation that would be expected in formal written assignments.Despite these concerns, student responses indicated that having a tutor and a group
of peers to interact with, or just to observe, was valued as a supportive feature of this form of distance learning. No clear picture arose of how to make conferencing more
interactive for more students, and this reinforces the sense gained from the tutor interviews of the difficulty of proposing a model of tutoring in computer conferences
that will necessarily engage all students or raise the level of discussion and debate.
Conclusions
Our study suggests that text-based conferencing has an important role to play in developing students’ argumentation strategies and understanding of academic
discourse and conventions. In view of its hybrid nature, somewhere between spontaneous speech and formal academic writing, course designers and tutors should aim to take advantage of both aspects – on the one hand, the informal
dialogic exchange of opinions and co-construction of knowledge, and on the other,the opportunity for consolidation, reflection and re-positioning.
Our findings reinforce the view that students’ willingness to exchange ideas freely and openly is partly a consequence of how personally engaged, at ease and
confident students feel with one another and their tutor. In particular, it seems that there is a role for the interpersonal and, to some extent, the chat and the frivolity, which in some other studies discussed in the literature review have been regarded as negative influences.
Recommendations
To facilitate students’ development of argumentation and learning more generally,tutors need greater awareness of the ways in which academic argumentation operates in computer conferencing as compared to written assignments. Since pedagogic strategies developed in other contexts may not transfer well to computer conferencing, there is a need for targeted professional development, focussing in
particular on:
• Choosing topics for discussion and designing effective task prompts;
• Supporting weaker students;
• Encouraging challenging of ideas;
• Finding the right tone to facilitate peer discussions.
Some specific suggestions are made within the report, but our recommendations at this stage remain tentative as we still have to complete the analysis of the assignment data and draw conclusions about the impact of the computer
conferencing on the quality of written argumentation within this more formal context
Can AI Moderate Online Communities?
The task of cultivating healthy communication in online communities becomes
increasingly urgent, as gaming and social media experiences become
progressively more immersive and life-like. We approach the challenge of
moderating online communities by training student models using a large language
model (LLM). We use zero-shot learning models to distill and expand datasets
followed by a few-shot learning and a fine-tuning approach, leveraging
open-access generative pre-trained transformer models (GPT) from OpenAI. Our
preliminary findings suggest, that when properly trained, LLMs can excel in
identifying actor intentions, moderating toxic comments, and rewarding positive
contributions. The student models perform above-expectation in non-contextual
assignments such as identifying classically toxic behavior and perform
sufficiently on contextual assignments such as identifying positive
contributions to online discourse. Further, using open-access models like
OpenAI's GPT we experience a step-change in the development process for what
has historically been a complex modeling task. We contribute to the information
system (IS) discourse with a rapid development framework on the application of
generative AI in content online moderation and management of culture in
decentralized, pseudonymous communities by providing a sample model suite of
industrial-ready generative AI models based on open-access LLMs
Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions
Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS)
projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments
accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the
software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS
stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the
discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are
lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address
this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue
discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads
across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and
created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of
supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior
knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect
most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length
and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic
Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for
certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a
nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and
obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software
engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Comment: 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
(ICSE2019
Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems
In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation
of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development
process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations
and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive.
Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the
involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and
methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue
systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and
question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the
main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the
evaluation methods regarding this class
Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs
The integration of emotional support into various conversational scenarios
presents profound societal benefits, such as social interactions, mental health
counseling, and customer service. However, there are unsolved challenges that
hinder real-world applications in this field, including limited data
availability and the absence of well-accepted model training paradigms. This
work endeavors to navigate these challenges by harnessing the capabilities of
Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce an innovative methodology that
synthesizes human insights with the computational prowess of LLMs to curate an
extensive emotional support dialogue dataset. Our approach is initiated with a
meticulously designed set of dialogues spanning diverse scenarios as generative
seeds. By utilizing the in-context learning potential of ChatGPT, we
recursively generate an ExTensible Emotional Support dialogue dataset, named
ExTES. Following this, we deploy advanced tuning techniques on the LLaMA model,
examining the impact of diverse training strategies, ultimately yielding an LLM
meticulously optimized for emotional support interactions. An exhaustive
assessment of the resultant model showcases its proficiency in offering
emotional support, marking a pivotal step in the realm of emotional support
bots and paving the way for subsequent research and implementations
Managing access to the internet in public libraries in the UK: the findings of the MAIPLE project
One of the key purposes of the public library is to provide access to information (UNESCO, 1994). In the UK, information is provided in printed formats and for the last decade via public access Internet workstations installed as part of the People’s Network initiative. Recent figures reveal that UK public libraries provide approximately 40,000
computer terminals offering users around 80,000 hours across more than 4,000 service points (CIPFA, 2012). In addition, increasing numbers of public libraries allow users to connect devices such as tablets or smart phones to the Internet via a wireless network access point (Wi-Fi). How do public library staff manage this? What about users viewing
harmful or illegal content? And what are the implications for a profession committed to freedom of access to information and opposition to censorship?
MAIPLE, a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council has been investigating this issue as little was known about how UK public libraries manage Internet content control including illegal material. MAIPLE has drawn on an extensive review of the literature, an online survey to which all UK public library services were invited to participate (39 per cent response rate) and case studies with five services (two in England, one in Scotland, one in
Wales and one in Northern Ireland) to examine the ways these issues are managed and their implications for staff.
This presentation will explore the prevalence of tools such as filtering software, Acceptable Use Policies, user authentication, booking software and visual monitoring by staff and consider their efficacy and desirability in the provision of public Internet access. It will consider the professional dilemmas inherent within managing content and
access. Finally, it will highlight some of the more important themes emerging from the findings and their implications for practitioners and policy makers
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