Models for finding quality of affirmation and points of intervention in an academic discussion forum

Automated coding of student chats, a trans-topic and language approach

“…In a modest scenario, these automated coding tools can reduce the role of the researcher to only check the coding outputs and make corrections where necessary. More ambitiously, such tools could function in real-time, e.g., in supporting the operation of conversational agents (Lalingkar et al, 2022;McLaren et al, 2010). But to date, successful cases of doing so in CSCL settings are limited.…”

“…Not only embeddings but entire pre-trained models that extract similar features from text during training have been used in related work. For instance, Lalingkar et al (2022) reported a high reliability when employing a large pre-trained model to predict the clarity of affirmation in forum discussions. These authors did note the usefulness of such a tool in practice to trigger interventions, but they did not elaborate on how well their model could be applied to other contexts.…”