Learning the Use of Discourse Markers in Tutorial Dialogue for an Intelligent Tutoring System

Proc. 22nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society CogSci ’2000, Philadelphia, pp. 262–267. (corr. 6/5/00).Learning the Use of Discourse Markers in Tutorial Dialoguefor an Intelligent Tutoring SystemJung Hee Kim(janice@steve.iit.edu) IITMichael Glass(michael.glass@iit.edu) IITReva Freedman(freedrk+@pitt.edu) LRDCMartha W. Evens(evens@iit.edu) IITDepartment of Computer Science Learning Research and Development CenterIllinois Institute of Technology University of Pittsburgh10 W. 31st St. 3939 O’Hara St.Chicago, IL 60616 Pittsburgh, PA 15260topics and digressions and describes them in concert withAbstractinterpersonal “interactional signals.” Schiffrin (1987)Usage of discourse markers in tutorial language can make the provides a detailed accounting of the behavior and purposedifference between stilted and natural sounding dialogue. Inof eleven discourse markers without being tied to athis paper we describe some simple rules for selection ofparticular theory of discourse or syntax. Schiffrin alsodiscourse markers. These rules were derived for use in anprovides an operational definition of discourse markers,intelligent tutoring system by applying decision-tree machinegiving evidence that discourse markers have functions suchlearning to human tutoring language. The fact that theseas aiding coherence and cohesion in text. Halliday andselection rules operate within the environment of anintention-based planner encouraged us to derive our decision ...