Characterizing the effectiveness of tutorial dialogue with hidden markov models

  • Authors:
  • Kristy Elizabeth Boyer;Robert Phillips;Amy Ingram;Eun Young Ha;Michael Wallis;Mladen Vouk;James Lester

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;,Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina;Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;,Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University

  • Venue:
  • ITS'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Identifying effective tutorial dialogue strategies is a key issue for intelligent tutoring systems research. Human-human tutoring offers a valuable model for identifying effective tutorial strategies, but extracting them is a challenge because of the richness of human dialogue. This paper addresses that challenge through a machine learning approach that 1) learns tutorial strategies from a corpus of human tutoring, and 2) identifies the statistical relationships between student outcomes and the learned strategies. We have applied hidden Markov modeling to a corpus of annotated task-oriented tutorial dialogue to learn one model for each of two effective human tutors. We have identified significant correlations between the automatically extracted tutoring modes and student learning outcomes. This work has direct applications in authoring data-driven tutorial dialogue system behavior and in investigating the effectiveness of human tutoring.