Abstract
We present a novel method to analyse speaker alignment in second language practice dialogue. Our method represents utterances as Dialogue Acts and applies Epistemic Network Analysis to their use. ENA makes convergence between speakers visible, and enables us to confirm hypotheses that both initial similarity and final convergence increase with student ability; and that Dialogue Act use changes with ability, and over the course of an interaction. Our results can inform personalised automatic tutoring tools as well as formative assessment and feedback.
We acknowledge useful input from Ed Fincham, Pablo Leon, Nicolas Collignon, Kate McCurdy, Clara Vania, Naomi Saphra, Toms Bergmanis, Sameer Bansal, Ida Szubert, Maria Corkery, Federico Fancellu and our anonymous reviewers.
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Notes
- 1.
The item being aligned to in this context is known as the prime, and the subsequent usage of this prime by the other speaker is known as the target, or sign of alignment.
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Sinclair, A.J., Ferreira, R., Gašević, D., Lucas, C.G., Lopez, A. (2019). I Wanna Talk Like You: Speaker Adaptation to Dialogue Style in L2 Practice Conversation. In: Isotani, S., Millán, E., Ogan, A., Hastings, P., McLaren, B., Luckin, R. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11626. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23207-8_48
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