This paper describes preliminary work in exploring the relative effectiveness of speech versus text based tutoring. Most current tutorial dialogue systems are text based (Evens et al., 2001; Rose and Aleven, 2002; Zinn et al., 2002; Aleven et al., 2001; VanLehn et al., 2002). However, prior studies have shown considerable benefits of tutoring through spoken interactions (Lemke, 1990; Chi et al., 1994; Hausmann and Chi, 2002). Thus, we are currently developing a speech based dialogue system that uses a text based system for tutoring conceptual physics (VanLehn et al., 2002) as its back-end. In order to explore the relative effectiveness between these two input modalities in our task domain, we have started by collecting parallel human-human tutoring corpora both for text based and speech based tutoring. In both cases, students interact with the tutor through a web interface. We present here a comparison between the two on a number of features of dialogue that have been demonstrated to correlate reliably with learning gains with students interacting with the tutor using the text based interface (Ros´e et al., submitted).
For a PDF full article version, click here (118KB).