2006 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Intonational Cues to Student Questions in Tutoring Dialogs

Hirschberg, Julia Bell; Venditti, Jennifer J.; Liscombe, Jackson

Successful Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) must be able to recognize when their students are asking a question. They must identify question form as well as function in order to respond appropriately. Our study examines whether intonational features, specifically, F0 height and rise range, are useful cues to student question type in a corpus of 643 American English questions. Results show a quantitative effect of both form and function. In addition, among clarification-seeking questions, we observed differences based on the type of clarification being sought. 1 Index Terms: intonation, questions, tutoring, dialog acts.