Acknowledgments, e.g., “yeah” and “uh-huh,” are ubiquitous in human conversation but are rarer in human-computer interaction. What interface factors might contribute to this difference? Using a simple spoken-language interface that responded to acknowledgments, we compared subjects’ use of acknowledgments when the interface used recorded speech with that seen when the interface used synthesized...

Computer-based prompting and reminder systems have been shown to be highly effective in increasing rates of preventive services delivery. However, there are many more recommended preventive services than can be practically included in a typical clinic visit. Therefore prioritization of preventive services prompts is necessary. We describe two approaches to prioritizing preventive services promp...

We propose to automatically summarize student responses to reflection prompts and introduce a novel summarization algorithm that differs from traditional methods in several ways. First, since the linguistic units of student inputs range from single words to multiple sentences, our summaries are created from extracted phrases rather than from sentences. Second, the phrase summarization algorithm...

This study examined the effects of self-explanation prompts on problem-solving performance. In total, 47 students were recruited and trained to debug web-program code in an online learning environment. Students in an open self-explanation group were asked to explain the problem cases to themselves, whereas a complete other-explanation group was provided with partial explanations and asked to co...

This poster investigates how self-explanation and self-assessment prompts can help students learn from dynamic visualizations of chemical reactions. We compared students’ selfassessments immediately after the visualizations to self-assessments after visualizations plus explanation prompts. Immediately after interacting with the visualization students overestimated their understanding compared t...

This paper reports results on verbal behavior in a live natural language call routing speech application. Differences between male and female callers in terms of verbosity are investigated, and put in relation to three variations of the system prompts. Findings show that in this particular application female callers are more verbose than male callers for open style prompts, while there is no di...

Past research has shown that collaboration can facilitate learning and problem solving (e.g., Azmitia, 1988; Barron, 2000). In the current work, we compared the effects of three collaborative learning conditions: prompts that encourage analogical comparison between examples, prompts that guide sequentially studying single examples, and traditional instruction (practicing problem solving), as st...