Identification of Students’ Need Deficiency Through a Dialogue System

In the domain of moral education, students’ need deficiency refers to the unsatisfied need that would result in problem behaviors. Timely and accurate identification of students’ need deficiency is crucial to moral education and the students themselves. Previous psychology research focusing on distinct factors only provides scattered guidelines to identify such need deficiencies and meanwhile few teachers and parents have the related expertise, which makes the identification task difficult to accomplish. To address these issues, we develop a task-oriented dialogue system to help teachers and parents identify students’ need deficiency through multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, relevant factors of need deficiency are summarized based on psychology theories, which provides a theoretical foundation for the newly proposed system. In addition, reinforcement learning methodology is adopted to learn dialogue policy to serve the designed dialogue system. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed dialogue system achieves its design objectives.