Doctoral seminar by Ming Chiu from The Education University of Hong Kong invited by James Thewissen
As people solve problems together that they cannot do alone, automatic analysis of conversations can inform and enhance their collaborative problem solving. Such analyses must traverse the obstacle course of voice transcription, complex categorization, and statistical analysis. Automated transcription feeds automatic categorization via computational linguistics and large language models to create a database (Big Data). Automated statistical analysis integrates statistical discourse analysis (SDA) and artificial intelligence. SDA models (a) pivotal actions that radically change subsequent processes and (b) explanatory variables at multiple levels (sequences of turns/messages, time periods, individuals, groups, organizations, etc.) on multiple target actions. The artificial intelligence expert system translates a theory into a statistical model, tests it on the data, interprets the results, (if needed, rewrites itself to execute revised analyses), and prints a table of results. I showcase automated SDA on 321,867 words in 1,330 messages by 17 student-teachers in 13 weekly online discussions of lesson designs.