Comprehension-Driven Generation of Meta-Technical Utterances in Math Tutoring

A technical discussion often contains conversational expressions like “however,” “as I have stated before,” “next,” etc. These expressions, denoted Meta-technical Utterances (MTUs) carry important information which the listener uses to speed up the comprehension process. In this research we model the meaning of MTUs in terms of their anticipated effect on the listener comprehension, and use these predictions to select MTUs and weave them into a computer generated discourse. This paradigm was implemented in a system called FIGMENT, which generates commentaries on the solution of algebraic equations.