Classifying Student Initiatives and Tutor Responses in Human Keyboard-to-Keyboard Tutoring Sessions

This study analyzed 28 hour-long tutoring sessions that were carried out keyboard-tokeyboard with tutor and student in different rooms. The tutors were professors of physiology at Rush Medical College. The students were first year medical students. We classified student initiatives and tutor responses in human tutoring sessions with the goal of making our intelligent tutoring system capable of handling mixed-initiative dialogue. Student initiatives were classified along four dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, focus of attention, and degree of certainty (does the student hedge or not?). Student goals include: request for confirmation, request for information, challenge, refusal to answer, and conversational repair. Tutor responses were classified along three dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, and delivery mode. The tutor goals included: causal explanation, acknowledgment, conversational repair, instruction in the rules of the game, teaching the problem-solving alg...