A Semi-automated Wizard of Oz Interface for Modeling Tutorial Strategies

Human teaching strategies are usually inferred from transcripts of face-to-face conversations or computer-mediated dialogs between learner and tutor. However, during natural interactions there are no constraints on the human tutor’s behavior and thus tutorial strategies are difficult to analyze and reproduce in a computational model. To overcome this problem, we have realized a Wizard of Oz interface, which by constraining the tutor’s interaction makes explicit his decisions about why, how, and when to assist the student in a computer-based learning environment. These decisions automatically generate natural language utterances of different types according to two “politeness” strategies. We have successfully used the interface to model tutorial strategies.