Dialogue Modes in Expert Tutoring

Previous studies have examined human-to-human dialogue in expert tutoring on the speech act level, but these analyses fail to provide the context necessary for understanding how a series of speech acts relate to each other. This research examined tutorial dialogue in terms of sustained, pedagogically distinct phases, referred to as tutoring “modes”, which gives context to the finer-grained analysis of “moves”. Our accomplishments were twofold: we developed a new annotation scheme for tutorial dialogue that takes into account clusters of multiple dialogue moves, and we determined the extent to which these modes occurred in the tutoring sessions. We also examined likely sequences of modes, all of which are important factors when building an ITS that reproduces the efforts of expert human tutors.