Call for Participation

BEA 2023 Shared Task: Generating AI Teacher Responses in Educational
Dialogues

https://sig-edu.org/sharedtask/2023


SHARED TASK DESCRIPTION
Conversational agents offer promising opportunities for education. They can
fulfill various roles (e.g., intelligent tutors and service-oriented
assistants) and pursue different objectives (e.g., improving student skills
and increasing instructional efficiency) (Wollny et al. 2021). Among all of
these different vocations of an educational chatbot, the most prevalent one
is the *AI teacher* helping a student with skill improvement and providing
more opportunities to practice. Some recent meta-analyses have even
reported a significant effect of chatbots on skill improvement, for example
in language learning (Bibauw et al. 2022). What is more, current advances
in AI and natural language processing have led to the development of
conversational agents that are founded on more powerful generative language
models.

Despite these promising opportunities, the use of powerful generative
models as a foundation for downstream tasks also presents several crucial
challenges. In the educational domain in particular, it is important to
ascertain whether that foundation is solid or flimsy. Bommasani et al.
(2021: pp. 67-72) stressed that, if we want to put these models into
practice as AI teachers, it is imperative to determine whether they can (a)
speak to students like a teacher, (b) understand students, and (c) help
students improve their understanding. Therefore, Tack and Piech (2022)
formulated the* AI teacher test challenge*: How can we test whether
state-of-the-art generative models are good AI teachers, capable of
replying to a student in an educational dialogue?

Following the AI teacher test challenge, we organize a *first shared task
on the generation of teacher language in educational dialogues*. The goal
of the task is to use NLP and AI methods to generate teacher responses in
real-world samples of teacher-student interactions. These samples are taken
from the Teacher Student Chatroom Corpus (Caines et al. 2020; Caines et al.
2022). Each training sample is composed of a dialogue context (i.e.,
several teacher-student utterances) as well as the teacher’s response. For
each test sample, participants are asked to submit their best generated
teacher response.

The purpose of the task is to *benchmark the ability of generative models
to act as AI teachers, replying to a student in a teacher-student dialogue*.
Submissions will be ranked according to several automated dialogue
evaluation metrics, with the top submissions selected for further human
evaluation. During this manual evaluation, human raters will compare a pair
of teacher responses in terms of three abilities: can speak like a teacher,
can understand a student, can help a student (Tack & Piech 2022). As such,
we adopt an evaluation method that is akin to ACUTE-Eval for evaluating
dialogue systems (Li et al. 2019).

*PARTICIPATION*
The shared task is hosted on *CodaLab* (Pavao et al. 2022). Anyone
participating in the shared task will be asked to:

1. Register on the CodaLab <https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/> platform.
2. Fill in the registration form <https://forms.gle/iAdKCq3dRS9srzjc6> with
their CodaLab ID. Participants must comply with the terms and conditions of
the task and the TSCC data outlined in the form.
3. Register for the CodaLab competition
<https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/11705> using the CodaLab ID.
We will only accept people who submitted the registration form. Note that
you can participate as a member of one team only.

*IMPORTANT DATES*

*Fri Mar 24, 2023*          Training data release
*Mon May 1, 2023*         Test data release
*Fri May 5, 2023*            Final submissions due
*Mon May 8, 2023*         Results announced
*Fri May 12, 2023*          Human evaluation results announced
*Mon May 22, 2023*       System papers due
*Fri May 26, 2023*          Paper reviews returned
*Tue May 30, 2023*        Camera-ready papers due
*Mon June 12, 2023*     Pre-recorded video due
*July 13, 2023*               BEA Workshop at ACL

*ORGANIZERS*

Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven; Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI; Zheng Yuan, King’s
College London; Serge Bibauw, Universidad Central del Ecuador; Chris Piech,
Stanford University

*Webpage*: https://sig-edu.org/sharedtask/2023
<https://sig-edu.org/sharedtask/2023>
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