Experiments with ITSPOKE: An Intelligent Tutoring Spoken Dialogue System

While human tutors typically interact with students using spoken
dialogue, most computer dialogue tutors are text-based.  To evaluate
the utility of adding spoken language capabilities to dialogue tutors,
we have developed ITSPOKE, a speech-based dialogue system that uses
the Why2-Atlas text-based tutoring system as its ``back-end.''  In
ITSPOKE, a student first types a natural language answer to a
qualitative physics problem.  ITSPOKE then engages the student in a
spoken dialogue to provide feedback and correct misconceptions, and to
elicit more complete explanations.

In this talk, I will first describe ITSPOKE.  I will then present the
results of two experiments comparing typed and spoken tutoring
dialogues, one in a human-human scenario, and another in the ITSPOKE
human-computer scenario.  Our main results are that changing the
modality from text to speech caused large differences in the learning
gains, efficiency and superficial dialogue characteristics of human
tutoring, but for our first version of ITSPOKE, it made less
difference.