Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

This study investigates the potential of ChatGPT, a cutting-edge large language model in generative artificial intelligence (AI), to support the teaching of dialogic pedagogy to preservice teachers. A workshop was conducted with 29 preservice teachers, wherein ChatGPT and another prominent AI model, Bert, were sequentially integrated to facilitate…

Negotiation mechanism using conversational agents (chatbots) has been used in Open Learner Models (OLM) to enhance learner model accuracy and provide opportunities for learner reflection. Using chatbots that allow for natural language discussions has shown positive learning gains in students. Traditional OLMs assume a learner to be able to manage…

Archived transcripts from tens of millions of online human tutoring sessions potentially contain important knowledge about how online tutors help, or fail to help, students learn. However, without ways of automatically analyzing these large corpora, any knowledge in this data will remain buried. One way to approach this issue is to train an…

This dissertation studies how people describe emotions with language and how computers can simulate this descriptive behavior. Although many non-human animals can express their current emotions as social signals, only humans can communicate about emotions symbolically. This symbolic communication of emotion allows us to talk about emotions that we…

While many studies have demonstrated that conversational tutoring systems have a positive effect on learning, the amount of manual effort required to author, design, and tune dialogue behaviors remains a major barrier to widespread deployment and adoption of these systems. Such dialogue systems must not only understand student speech, but must…

This article argues that a clear division between two sources of information--one oriented to world knowledge, the other to linguistic semantics--offers a framework within which mechanisms for modelling the highly flexible relation between language and interpretation necessary for natural discourse can be specified and empirically validated.…

We annotated transcripts of human tutoring dialogue for the purpose of constructing a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system, CIRCSIM-Tutor. The tutors were professors of physiology who were also expert tutors. The students were 1st year medical students who communicated with the tutors using typed communication from separate rooms. The tutors…