This paper evaluates dialogue-based student performance in a controlled experiment using versions of a tutoring system with and without automatic adaptation to the student affective state of uncertainty. Our performance metrics include correctness, uncertainty, and learning impasse severities, which are measured in a “test ” dialogue after the tutoring treatment. Although these metrics did not significantly differ across conditions when considering all student answers in our test dialogue, we found significant differences in specific types of student answers, and these differences suggest that our uncertainty adaptation does have a positive benefit on student performance.

Abstract. Pedagogical agent research seeks to exploit Reeves and Nass’s Media Equation, which holds that users respond to interactive media as if they were social actors. Investigations have tended to focus on the media used to realize the pedagogical agent, e.g., the use of animated talking heads and voices, and the results

The story of the automaton had struck deep root into their souls and, in fact, a pernicious mistrust of human figures in general had begun to creep in. Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamoured of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time, to embroider and knit, and play with their lapdogs, while listening to reading, etc., and, above all, not merely to listen, but also sometimes to talk, in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling. (Hoffmann 1844)

Abstract. Politeness may play a role in tutorial interaction, including promoting learner motivation and avoiding negative affect. Politeness theory can account for this as a means of mitigating the face threats arising in tutorial situations. It further provides a way of accounting for differences in politeness in different cultures.

Abstract. Recent research on conversational agents emphasises the need to build affective conversational systems with social intelligence. Politeness is an integral part of socially appropriate and affective conversational behaviour, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either “Get me a glass of water mate! ” or “I wonder if I could possibly have some water please? ” This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a spoken language generator with an artificial intelligence planner to model Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness in collaborative task-oriented dialogue, with the ultimate goal of providing a fun and stimulating environment for learning English as a second language. An evaluation of politeness perceptions of POLLy’s output shows that: (1) perceptions are generally consistent with Brown and Levinson’s predictions for choice of form and for discourse situation, i.e. utterances to strangers need to be much more polite than those to friends; (2) our indirect strategies which should be the politest forms, are seen as the rudest; and (3) English and Indian native speakers of English have different perceptions of politeness. 1

In this work we are investigating the learning benefits of e-Learning principles (a) within the context of a web-based intelligent tutor and (b) in the “wild,” that is, in real classroom (or homework) usage, outside of a controlled laboratory. In the study described in this paper, we focus on the benefits of

Abstract 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. 1

We present a demo of our conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness is used to constrain the dialogue generation process.

In this paper, we describe the design of a goal-based problem solving oriented interactive game on biodiversity. The audience is children ranging from age 6 to 14. We focus in our paper especially on a) the instructional design of the game and b) the support structures. We differentiate between modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and general support structures and focus especially on the design of scaffolds that were integrated in order to provide learners with feedback, guidelines, and help structure.

Virtual agents, pedagogical agents, social relationships, social dialog, dialog modeling, serious games, simulation-based learning, educational technology, intercultural competence, interpersonal skills training, human-computer interaction. Embodied conversational agents put a “human ” touch on intelligent tutoring systems by using conversation to support learning. When considering instruction in interpersonal domains, such as intercultural negotiation, the development of an interpersonal relationship with one’s pedagogical agent may play a significant role in learning. However, there is conflicting evidence in the literature both regarding the ability of agents to cultivate social relationships with humans, and their effect on learning. In this dissertation, I present a model of social dialog designed to affect learners ’ interpersonal relations with virtual agents, a development process for creating social dialog, and empirical studies showing that this dialog has significant effects on learners ’ perceptions of the