Detection of Listener Uncertainty in Robot-Led Second Language Conversation Practice

Uncertainty is a frequently occurring affective state that learners ex-perience during the acquisition of a second language. This state canconstitute both a learning opportunity and a source of learner frus-tration. An appropriate detection could therefore benefit the learn-ing process by reducing cognitive instability. In this study, we usea dyadic practice conversation between an adult second-languagelearner and a social robot to elicit events of uncertainty throughthe manipulation of the robot’s spoken utterances (increased lex-ical complexity or prosody modifications). The characteristics ofthese events are then used to analyze multi-party practice conver-sations between a robot and two learners. Classification models aretrained with multimodal features from annotated events of listener(un)certainty. We report the performance of our models on differentsettings, (sub)turn segments and multimodal inputs.QC 20200930Collaborative Robot Assisted Language Learnin