The use of analogies in human tutoring dialogues

This paper discusses the use of analogies in human tutoring dialogues. Our long-term goal is to implement analogies in the CIRCSIM-Tutor system, an intelligent tutoring system that carries on a natural language dialogue with the student. We need to analyze human tutoring strategies that make use of analogies and the language that supports these strategies, so that our system can propose analogies to students and follow them up appropriately. The system needs to be capable of recognizing student misunderstandings and remedying them. All this will require the use of a computational model of analogy, which may eventually allow our system to recognize analogies proposed by students as well