Estimating the Effectiveness of Conversational Behaviors in a Reading Tutor that Listens

Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor listens to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read. Besides user satisfaction, a primary criterion for tutorial spoken dialogue agents should be educational effectiveness. In order to learn to be more effective, a spoken dialogue agent must be able to evaluate the effect of its own actions. When evaluating the effectiveness of individual actions, rather than comparing a conversational action to "nothing," an agent must compare it to reasonable alternative actions. We describe a methodology for analyzing the immediate effect of a conversational action, and some of the difficulties in doing so. We also describe some preliminary results on evaluating the effectiveness of conversational behaviors in a reading tutor that listens.