Challenges for a Mixed Initiative Spoken Dialog System for Oral Reading Tutoring

Deciding when a task is complete and deciding when to intervene and provide assistance are two basic challenges for an intelligent tutoring system. This paper describes these decisions in the context of Project LISTEN, an oral reading tutor that listens to children read aloud and helps them. We present theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrating that supporting mixed initiative interaction produces better decisions on the task completeness decision than either system-only or useronly initiative. We describe some desired characteristics of a solution to the intervention decision, and specify possible evaluation criteria for such a solution.