A Time to Be Silent and a Time to Speak: Time-Sensitive Communicative Actions in a Reading Tutor that Listens
Gregory Aist, Jack Mostow · 2001
Timing is important in discourse, and key in tutoring. Communicative actions that are too late or too early may be infelicitous. How can an agent engage in temporally appropriate behavior? We present a domain-independent architecture that models elapsed time as a critical factor in understanding the discourse. Our architecture also allows for “invisible experiments” where the agent varies its behavior and studies the effects of its behavior on the discourse. This architecture has been instantiated and is in use in an oral reading tutor that listens to children read aloud and helps them.