Socially Capable Conversational Tutors Can Be Effective in Collaborative Learning Situations

Tutorial Dialog has been shown to be effective in supporting both individual as well as group learners. However, unlike the case with individual learners, teams of learners often ignore and abuse the automated tutors. Both theory and empirical work in the area of small-group communication argue that group participants display both task as well as socio-emotional behaviors during interactions. However, in connection with automated conversational agents, the effects of socio-emotional behaviors are much less well understood, especially in the case of multi-party interactions. In this paper, we will describe a sociallycapable conversational tutor that supports teams of three (or more) learners in a design task. Further, this tutor is evaluated in comparison with a socially-neutral baseline agent and human capability “gold standard” tutors. Results show that our socially-capable tutors can be effective support, even though there is still room for improvement to match the human gold sta...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ITS
• Authors: Rohit Kumar, Hua Ai, Jack L. Beuth, Carolyn Penstein Rosé
• Keywords: Gold Standard, Individual Learners, ITS 2010, Multimedia, Socio-emotional Behaviors