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AIEDU
2008

Be Brief, And They Shall Learn: Generating Concise Language Feedback for a Computer Tutor

13 years 9 months ago
Be Brief, And They Shall Learn: Generating Concise Language Feedback for a Computer Tutor
To investigate whether more concise Natural Language feedback improves learning, we developed two Natural Language generators (DIAG-NLP1 and DIAG-NLP2), to provide feedback in an Intelligent Tutoring System that teaches troubleshooting. We systematically evaluated them in a three way comparison that included the original system, which generates overly repetitive feedback. We found that DIAG-NLP2, the generator which intuitively produces the best, corpus-based language, does engender the most learning. Distinguishing features of the more effective feedback are: it obeys Grice's maxim of brevity, it is more directive and uses a specific type of referring expressions. Interestingly, simpler ways of restructuring the original repetitive feedback as done in DIAG-NLP1, such as exploiting the hierarchical structure of the domain, were not effective. Since the design of interfaces to Intelligent Tutoring Systems often includes verbal feedback, we suggest that: if the number of different c...
Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Susan M. Halle
Added 24 Jan 2011
Updated 24 Jan 2011
Type Journal
Year 2008
Where AIEDU
Authors Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Susan M. Haller, Dan Yu, Michael Glass
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