Using Student Explanations as Models for Adapting Tutorial Dialogue

We describe a dialogue management approach that adapts dialogue strategies to a changing user model under the constraint that the approach be able to scale up rapidly for intelligent tutoring systems applications. Dialogue strategies are expressed as constraints on how to move through a student model that is composed of linked nodes. By orienting the dialogue to a linked model of the student’s likely beliefs and expressing the dialogue strategies as constraints on movement within the model, the approach facilitates adaptation of the dialogue strategy as the student model changes.