# TUTORING: Instruction-Grounded Conversational Agent for Language Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12623/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03188/) (2022)
- [Gradio: Hassle-Free Sharing and Testing of ML Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02569/) (2019)
- [FreeTalky: Don't Be Afraid! Conversations Made Easier by a Humanoid Robot using Persona-based Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04126/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Plan-Grounded Large Language Models for Dual Goal Conversational Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01053/) (2024)
- [YA-TA: Towards Personalized Question-Answering Teaching Assistants using Instructor-Student Dual Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00355/) (2024)
- [Are Today's LLMs Ready to Explain Well-Being Concepts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03990/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose Tutoring bot, a generative chatbot trained on a large scale of tutor-student conversations for English-language learning. To mimic a human tutor's behavior in language education, the tutor bot leverages diverse educational instructions and grounds to each instruction as additional input context for the tutor response generation. As a single instruction generally involves multiple dialogue turns to give the student sufficient speaking practice, the tutor bot is required to monitor and capture when the current instruction should be kept or switched to the next instruction. For that, the tutor bot is learned to not only generate responses but also infer its teaching action and progress on the current conversation simultaneously by a multi-task learning scheme. Our Tutoring bot is deployed under a non-commercial use license at https://tutoringai.com.