Exploring Teachers' Perspectives on Using Conversational AI Agents for Group Collaboration

Collaboration is a cornerstone of 21st-century learning, yet teachers continue to face challenges in supporting productive peer interaction. Emerging generative AI tools offer new possibilities for scaffolding collaboration, but their role in mediating in-person group work remains underexplored, especially from the perspective of educators. This paper presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study with 33 K12 teachers who interacted with Phoenix, a voice-based conversational agent designed to function as a near-peer in face-to-face group collaboration. Drawing on playtesting sessions, surveys, and focus groups, we examine how teachers perceived the agent's behavior, its influence on group dynamics, and its classroom potential. While many appreciated Phoenix's capacity to stimulate engagement, they also expressed concerns around autonomy, trust, anthropomorphism, and pedagogical alignment. We contribute empirical insights into teachers' mental models of AI, reveal core design tensions, and outline considerations for group-facing AI agents that support meaningful, collaborative learning.

AmbER$^2$: Dual Ambiguity-Aware Emotion Recognition Applied to Speech and Text

Emotion recognition is inherently ambiguous, with uncertainty arising both from rater disagreement and from discrepancies across modalities such as speech and text. There is growing interest in modeling rater ambiguity using label distributions. However, modality ambiguity remains underexplored, and multimodal approaches often rely on simple feature fusion without explicitly addressing conflicts between modalities. In this work, we propose AmbER$^2$, a dual ambiguity-aware framework that simultaneously models rater-level and modality-level ambiguity through a teacher-student architecture with a distribution-wise training objective. Evaluations on IEMOCAP and MSP-Podcast show that AmbER$^2$ consistently improves distributional fidelity over conventional cross-entropy baselines and achieves performance competitive with, or superior to, recent state-of-the-art systems. For example, on IEMOCAP, AmbER$^2$ achieves relative improvements of 20.3% on Bhattacharyya coefficient (0.83 vs. 0.69), 13.6% on R$^2$ (0.67 vs. 0.59), 3.8% on accuracy (0.683 vs. 0.658), and 4.5% on F1 (0.675 vs. 0.646). Further analysis across ambiguity levels shows that explicitly modeling ambiguity is particularly beneficial for highly uncertain samples. These findings highlight the importance of jointly addressing rater and modality ambiguity when building robust emotion recognition systems.

Leveraging Large Language Models to Identify Conversation Threads in Collaborative Learning

Understanding how ideas develop and flow in small-group conversations is critical for analyzing collaborative learning. A key structural feature of these interactions is threading, the way discourse talk naturally organizes into interwoven topical strands that evolve over time. While threading has been widely studied in asynchronous text settings, detecting threads in synchronous spoken dialogue remains challenging due to overlapping turns and implicit cues. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) show promise for automating discourse analysis but often struggle with long-context tasks that depend on tracing these conversational links. In this paper, we investigate whether explicit thread linkages can improve LLM-based coding of relational moves in group talk. We contribute a systematic guidebook for identifying threads in synchronous multi-party transcripts and benchmark different LLM prompting strategies for automated threading. We then test how threading influences performance on downstream coding of conversational analysis frameworks, that capture core collaborative actions such as agreeing, building, and eliciting. Our results show that providing clear conversational thread information improves LLM coding performance and underscores the heavy reliance of downstream analysis on well-structured dialogue. We also discuss practical trade-offs in time and cost, emphasizing where human-AI hybrid approaches can yield the best value. Together, this work advances methods for combining LLMs and robust conversational thread structures to make sense of complex, real-time group interactions.