Modeling the Quality of Dialogical Explanations

verfasst von

Milad Alshomary, Felix Lange, Meisam Booshehri, Meghdut Sengupta, Philipp Cimiano, Henning Wachsmuth

Abstract

Explanations are pervasive in our lives. Mostly, they occur in dialogical form where an explainer discusses a concept or phenomenon of interest with an explainee. Leaving the explainee with a clear understanding is not straightforward due to the knowledge gap between the two participants. Previous research looked at the interaction of explanation moves, dialogue acts, and topics in successful dialogues with expert explainers. However, daily-life explanations often fail, raising the question of what makes a dialogue successful. In this work, we study explanation dialogues in terms of the interactions between the explainer and explainee and how they correlate with the quality of explanations in terms of a successful understanding on the explainee's side. In particular, we first construct a corpus of 399 dialogues from the Reddit forum Explain Like I am Five and annotate it for interaction flows and explanation quality. We then analyze the interaction flows, comparing them to those appearing in expert dialogues. Finally, we encode the interaction flows using two language models that can handle long inputs, and we provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness boost gained through the encoding in predicting the success of explanation dialogues.

Organisationseinheit(en)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover

Externe Organisation(en)

Columbia University
Universität Paderborn
Universität Bielefeld

Typ

Aufsatz in Konferenzband

Seiten

11523-11536

Anzahl der Seiten

14

Publikationsdatum

20.05.2024

Publikationsstatus

Veröffentlicht

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Theoretische Informatik, Theoretische Informatik und Mathematik, Angewandte Informatik

Elektronische Version(en)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.00662 (Zugang: Offen)