Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…

Post-problem reflective tutorial dialogues between human tutors and students are examined to predict when the tutor changed the level of abstraction from the student's preceding turn (i.e., used more general terms or more specific terms); such changes correlate with learning. Prior work examined lexical changes in abstraction. In this work, we…

The tremendous effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems is due in large part to their interactivity. However, when learners are free to choose the extent to which they interact with a tutoring system, not all learners do so actively. This paper examines a study with a natural language tutorial dialogue system for computer science, in which…