Investigating human tutor responses to student uncertainty for adaptive system development

Abstract

We use a χ2 analysis on our spoken dialogue tutoring corpus to investigate dependencies between uncertain student answers and 9 dialogue acts the human tutor uses in his response to these answers. Our results show significant dependencies between the tutor's use of some dialogue acts and the uncertainty expressed in the prior student answer, even after factoring out the answer's (in)correctness. Identification and analysis of these dependencies is part of our empirical approach to developing an adaptive version of our spoken dialogue tutoring system that responds to student affective states as well as to student correctness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.