A Classification of Dialogue Actions in Tutorial Dialogue

In this paper we present a taxonomy of dialogue moves which describe the actions that students and tutors perform in tutorial dialogue. We are motivated by the need for a categorisation of such actions in order to develop computational models for tutorial dialogue. As such, we build both on existing work on dialogue move categorisation for tutorial dialogue as well as dialogue taxonomies for general dialogue. Our taxonomy has been prepared by analysing a corpus of tutorial dialogues on mathematical theorem proving. We also detail an annotation experiment in which we apply the taxonomy and discuss idiosyncrasies in the data which influence the decisions in the dialogue move classification.