Indicators of Conversational Interactivity in COMPS Problem-Solving Dialogues

This paper reports on experiments in measuring the general level of conversational interactivity in COMPS problem-solving dialogues. COMPS is a web-delivered computer-mediated problem solving chat environment for student collaborative exploratory learning. Toward the goal of computer monitoring of conversation quality, we have analyzed dialogue turns for Initiate and Respond dialogue moves as prescribed by Conversation Analysis theory. We propose that there are shallow measures of overall interactivity that correlate with how much the students are responding. This paper reports on experiments in measuring the general level of conversational interactivity in COMPS problemsolving dialogues by attempting to classify each turn as Initiate and Respond and by attempting to predict the percentage of Respond turns.