SCoT: a Spoken Conversational Tutor

We describe SCoT, a Spoken Conversational Tutor, which has been implemented in order to investigate the advantages of natural language in tutoring, especially spoken language. SCoT uses a generic architecture for conversational intelligence which has capabilities such as turn management and coordination of multi-modal input and output. SCoT also includes a set of domain independent tutorial recipes, a domain specific production-rule knowledge base, and many natural language components including a bi-directional grammar, a speech recognizer, and a text-to-speech synthesizer. SCoT leads a reflective tutorial discussion based on the details of a problem solving session with a real-time Navy shipboard damage control simulator. The tutor attempts to identify and remediate gaps in the student'