Tutorial Dialogue Structures as Task-level Grounding Exchanges
Speaker: Mark Buckley
Institution: Saarland University
Abstract:
Tutorial dialogue is a subgenre of task-oriented dialogue, and as such, its structures depend heavily on how the solution to the current task is collaboratively built. Pedagogically motivated analyses have identified recurring local sequences of exchanges which we propose can be analysed analogously to grounding structures.
We present a model describing such local structures in which a learner and a tutor discuss contributions to a solution to the task. Such structures are modelled as "grounding" exchanges which operate at the task level, i.e. at the level of deep understanding of the domain. We treat understanding explicitly by requiring that students demonstrate sufficient domain-level evidence supporting a contribution in order for it to become grounded.
This work is an attempt to link general theories of dialogue with observations from pedagogical science. We comment on issues concerning the implementation of the model and outline an approach to a corpus-based evaluation.
