Spoken Versus Typed Human and Computer Dialogue Tutoring

Diane J. Litman, Learning Research and Development Center/Computer Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
litman@cs.pitt.edu
Carolyn P. Rosé, Language Technologies Institute/Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
cprose@cs.cmu.edu
Kate Forbes-Riley, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
forbesk@cs.pitt.edu
Kurt VanLehn, Learning Research and Development Center/Computer Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
vanlehn@cs.pitt.edu
Dumisizwe Bhembe, Scott Silliman, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
{bhembe,scotts}@pitt.edu

Abstract. While human tutors typically interact with students using spoken dialogue, most computer dialogue tutors are text-based. We have conducted two experiments comparing typed and spoken tutoring dialogues, one in a human-human scenario, and another in a human-computer scenario. In both experiments, we compared spoken versus typed tutoring for learning gains and time on task, and also measured the correlations of learning gains with dialogue features. Our main results are that changing the modality from text to speech caused changes in the learning gains, time and superficial dialogue characteristics of human tutoring, but for computer tutoring it made less difference.
Keywords. Dialogue, evaluation of AIED systems, intelligent tutoring systems, natural language interfaces for instructional systems, spoken language interface.

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