Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) bear the opportunity to analyze the argumentation quality of texts. This can be leveraged to provide students with individual and adaptive feedback in their personal learning journey. To test if individual feedback on students' argumentation will help them to write more convincing texts, we developed AL, an adaptive IT tool that provides students with feedback on the argumentation structure of a given text. We compared AL with 54 students to a proven argumentation support tool. We found students using AL wrote more convincing texts with better formal quality of argumentation compared to the ones using the traditional approach. The measured technology acceptance provided promising results to use this tool as a feedback application in different learning settings. The results suggest that learning applications based on NLP may have a beneficial use for developing better writing and reasoning for students in traditional learning settings.

Figure 1: Screenshot of our adaptive dialog-based learning system: a user conducts a certain writing exercise and receives adaptive tutoring and feedback on the argumentation quality of her text

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) bear the opportunity to design new forms of human-computer interaction with conversational interfaces. We hypothesize that these interfaces can interactively engage students to increase response quality of course evaluations in education compared to the common standard of web surveys. Past research indicates that web surveys come with disadvantages, such as poor response quality caused by inattention, survey fatigue or satisficing behavior. To test if conversational interfaces have a positive impact on the level of enjoyment and the response quality, we design an NLPbased conversational agent and deploy it in a field experiment with 127 students in our lecture and compare it with a web survey as a baseline. Our findings indicate that using conversational agents for evaluations are resulting in higher levels of response quality and level of enjoyment, and are therefore, a promising approach to increase the effectiveness of surveys in general.

In this paper, we present a novel annotation approach to capture claims and premises of arguments and their relations in student-written persuasive peer reviews on business models in German language. We propose an annotation scheme based on annotation guidelines that allows to model claims and premises as well as support and attack relations for capturing the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written peer reviews. We conduct an annotation study with three annotators on 50 persuasive essays to evaluate our annotation scheme. The obtained interrater agreement of α = 0.57 for argument components and α = 0.49 for argumentative relations indicates that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to moderate agreement. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 1,000 persuasive student-written peer reviews on business models and our annotation guidelines to encourage future research on the design and development of argumentative writing support systems for students.

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Conversational Agents (CAs) have become a new paradigm for human-computer interaction. Despite the potential benefits, there are ethical challenges to the widespread use of these agents that may inhibit their use for individual and social goals. However, besides a multitude of behavioral and design-oriented studies on CAs, a distinct ethical perspective falls rather short in the current literature. In this paper, we present the first steps of our design science research project on principles for a value-sensitive design of CAs. Based on theoretical insights from 87 papers and eleven user interviews, we propose preliminary requirements and design principles for a value-sensitive design of CAs. Moreover, we evaluate the preliminary principles with an expert-based evaluation. The evaluation confirms that an ethical approach for design CAs might be promising for certain scenarios.

Argument identification is the fundamental block of every Argumentation Mining pipeline, which in turn is a young upcoming field with multiple applications ranging from strategy support to opinion mining and news fact-checking. We developed a model, which is tackling the two biggest practical and academic challenges of the research field today. First, it addresses the lack of corpus-agnostic models and, second, it tackles the problem of human-laborintensive NLP models being costly to develop. We do that by suggesting and implementing an easy-to-use solution that utilizes the latest advancements in natural language Transfer Learning. The result is a twofold contribution: A system that delivers state-of-the-art results in multiple corpora and opens up a new way of academic advancement of the field through Transfer Learning. Additionally, it provides the architecture for an easy-to-use tool that can be used for practical applications without the need for domain-specific knowledge.

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