Towards Modelling Tutorial Dialogue as Collaborative Solution Construction
Speaker:Mark Buckley
Institution: Saarland University
Abstract:
General dialogue models describe patterns of interaction between dialogue participants. For simple tasks, such as information seeking dialogues, finite state or form-based models are used. For more complex domains models based on planning (Cohen and Levesque 1990) and on agents' joint activity (Lochbaum 1998) have been proposed. In the context of building conversational agents for intelligent tutoring, there is a need to integrate tutoring-specific phenomena into a general theory of dialogue. However, in our analysis of two corpora of tutorial dialogues we find phenomena which are not accounted for by general dialogue models, such as students' explanations of their previously performed actions and students' self evaluations. This corroborates results found by Dzikovska et al (2006) in a similar setting.
In this talk we argue that a model of dialogue which additionally accounts for tutoring-specific phenomena will have the partial solution of the task at hand (modelled as a plan) as a core concept. Both student and tutor utterances can augment the current solution. Other utterances such as explanations or self evaluations can refer to (parts of) the solution without altering it. This allows both talk about the solution and talk which extends the solution. Incremental construction of the solution object is based on the analysis of the student's contributions by a domain-specific reasoner, and the solution model, along with a model of the interlocutors' beliefs, informs a tutoring module that chooses pedagogical-level actions.