Using Adaptive Empathetic Responses for Teaching English

Understand

Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety.

• Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning.
• We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback.
• This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners.