Dealing with Interpretation Errors in Tutorial Dialogue

We describe an approach to dealing with interpretation errors in a tutorial dialogue system. Allowing students to provide explanations and generate contentful talk can be helpful for learning, but the language that can be understood by a computer system is limited by the current technology. Techniques for dealing with understanding problems have been developed primarily for spoken dialogue systems in informationseeking domains, and are not always appropriate for tutorial dialogue. We present a classification of interpretation errors and our approach for dealing with them within an implemented tutorial dialogue system.