Abstract:

Previous research on building intelligent tutoring systems has not taken full advantage of general models of collaborative discourse even though tutoring is an inherently collaborative and often discourse-based activity. Similarly, previous research on collaborative discourse theory has rarely addressed tutorial issues even though teaching and learning are crucial components of collaboration. We help bridge the gap between these two related research threads by presenting a tutorial agent, called Paco, based on the apprenticeship model of learning, built using an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen. A primary contribution is to show how a variety of tutorial behaviors can be expressed as rules for generating candidate discourse acts in the framework of collaborative discourse theory.