Seminar of the PhD Program
title
Managing Natural Language Tutorial Dialogue
speaker
date & place
Wednesday, 04.11.2009, 16:15 h
Room C 252
abstract
Effective human tutoring has been compared to a delicate balancing
act. Students must be allowed to discover and correct problems on
their own, but the tutor must intervene before the student becomes
frustrated or confused. Natural language dialogue offers the tutor
many ways to lead the student through a line of reasoning, and to
indirectly notify the student of an error and use a series of hints
and followup questions to get the student back on track. These
sequences typically unfold across several conversational turns, during
which the student can make more errors, initiate topic changes, or
give more information than requested. Thus to support tutorial
interactions, we require an intelligent dialogue manager that can plan
ahead, but is able to adapt its plan to the dynamically changing
situation. In this talk, I shall discuss how we adapted a three-layer
architecture developed by researchers in robotics to the management of
tutorial dialogue. I shall describe BEETLE, an instantiation of the
resulting generic and modular architecture to the domain of Basic
Electricity and Electronics.
