How to Respond to Student Initiatives in Tutoring Systems

The necessity for building a sophisticated human-machine interface for our Intelligent Tutoring System, called CIRCSIM-Tutor, has motivated us to explore natural language text understanding and generation. One complex task for the generator is crafting a response to student initiatives. A student initiative occurs when a student takes control of the tutoring session temporarily by saying something that forces the tutor to change the course of action and respond to the new situation. A question asked by the student in itself is considered to be one kind of initiative. We have analyzed tutor responses to student initiatives and developed twelve classes of tutor responses to be used in CIRCSIM-Tutor.