Collecting the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus

We describe the collection of a dialogue corpus for language learning, one which we believe to be the first research corpus of its kind, and one which enables both close linguistic analysis and machine learning experiments in dialogue system training. The corpus is a collection of written conversations from one-to-one lessons between teachers and learners of English. The lessons took place in an online chatroom and therefore involve more interactive, immediate and informal language than might be found in asynchronous exchanges such as email correspondence. The fact that the lessons were one-to-one means that the teacher was able to focus exclusively on the linguistic abilities and errors of the student, and to offer personalised exercises, scaffolding and correction. The TSCC so far contains more than one hundred lessons between two teachers and eight students, amounting to 13.5K conversational turns and 133K words.