FEAT: A Preference Feedback Dataset through a Cost-Effective Auto-Generation and Labeling Framework for English AI Tutoring

AbstractIn English education tutoring, teacher feedback is essential for guiding students. Recently, AI-based tutoring systems have emerged to assist teachers; however, these systems require high-quality and large-scale teacher feedback data, which is both time-consuming and costly to generate manually. In this study, we propose FEAT, a cost-effective framework for generating teacher feedback, and have constructed three complementary datasets: (1) DIRECT-Manual (DM), where both humans and large language models (LLMs) collaboratively generate high-quality teacher feedback, albeit at a higher cost; (2) DIRECT-Generated (DG), an LLM-only generated, cost-effective dataset with lower quality;, and (3) DIRECT-Augmented (DA), primarily based on DG with a small portion of DM added to enhance quality while maintaining cost-efficiency. Experimental results showed that incorporating a small portion of DM (5–10%) into DG leads to superior performance compared to using 100% DM alone.