MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems
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Date
2023-12
Publication Type
Conference Paper
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yes
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Abstract
While automatic dialogue tutors hold great potential in making education personalized and more accessible, research on such systems has been hampered by a lack of sufficiently large and high-quality datasets. Collecting such datasets remains challenging, as recording tutoring sessions raises privacy concerns and crowdsourcing leads to insufficient data quality. To address this, we propose a framework to generate such dialogues by pairing human teachers with a Large Language Model (LLM) prompted to represent common student errors. We describe how we use this framework to collect MathDial, a dataset of 3k one-to-one teacher-student tutoring dialogues grounded in multi-step math reasoning problems. While models like GPT-3 are good problem solvers, they fail at tutoring because they generate factually incorrect feedback or are prone to revealing solutions to students too early. To overcome this, we let teachers provide learning opportunities to students by guiding them using various scaffolding questions according to a taxonomy of teacher moves. We demonstrate MathDial and its extensive annotations can be used to finetune models to be more effective tutors (and not just solvers). We confirm this by automatic and human evaluation, notably in an interactive setting that measures the trade-off between student solving success and telling solutions. The dataset is released publicly.
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published
Book title
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
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Pages / Article No.
5602 - 5621
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Event
2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023)
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09684 - Sachan, Mrinmaya / Sachan, Mrinmaya
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Related publications and datasets
Is supplemented by: https://github.com/eth-nlped/mathdial