Collaborative Discourse Theory as a Foundation for Tutorial Dialogue

Research on intelligent tutoring systems has not leveraged general models of collaborative discourse, even though tutoring is inherently collaborative. Similarly, research on collaborative discourse theory has rarely addressed tutorial issues, even though teaching and learning are important components of collaboration. We help bridge the gap between these two related research threads by presenting a tutorial agent, called Paco, that we built using a domain-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen. Our primary contribution is to show how a variety of tutorial behaviors can be expressed as rules for generating candidate discourse acts in the framework of collaborative discourse theory.