GrounDialog: A Dataset for Repair and Grounding in Task-oriented Spoken Dialogues for Language Learning

Xuanming Zhang, Rahul Divekar, Rutuja Ubale, Zhou Yu

18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications Paper

TLDR: Improving conversational proficiency is a key target for students learning a new language. While acquiring conversational proficiency, students must learn the linguistic mechanisms of Repair and Grounding (R\textbackslash{}\&G) to negotiate meaning and find common ground with their interlocutor so
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Abstract: Improving conversational proficiency is a key target for students learning a new language. While acquiring conversational proficiency, students must learn the linguistic mechanisms of Repair and Grounding (R\textbackslash{}\&G) to negotiate meaning and find common ground with their interlocutor so conversational breakdowns can be resolved. Task-oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) have long been sought as a tool to hone conversational proficiency. However, the R\&G patterns for language learners interacting with a task-oriented spoken dialogue system are not reflected explicitly in any existing datasets. Therefore, to move the needle in Spoken Dialogue Systems for language learning we present GrounDialog: an annotated dataset of spoken conversations where we elicit a rich set of R\&G patterns.