An Improved Interface for Tutorial Dialogues: Browsing a Visual Dialogue History

When participating in tutorial dialogues, human tutors freely refer to their own previous explanations. Explanation is an inherently incremental and interactive process. New information must be highlighted and related to what has already been presented. If user interfaces are to reap the benefits of natural language interaction, they must be endowed with the properties that make human natural language interaction so effective. This paper describes the design of a user interface that enables both the system and the user to refer to the past dialogue. The work is based on the notion that the dialogue history is a source of knowledge that can be manipulated like any other. In particular, we describe an interface that allows students to visualize the dialogue history on the screen, highlight its relevant parts and query and manipulate the dialogue history. We expect that these facilities will increase the effectiveness of the student learning of the task. KEYWORDS: Tutorial interactions, ..