Hedged Responses and Expressions of Affect in Human/Human and Human/Computer Tutorial Interactions
Khelan Bhatt, Martha W. Evens, Shlomo Argamon · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2004
We study how students hedge and express affect when interacting with both humans and computer systems, during keyboard-mediated natural language tutoring sessions in medicine. We found significant differences in such student behavior linked to whether the tutor was human or a computer. Students hedge and apologize often to human tutors, but very rarely to computer tutors. The type of expressions also differed---overt hostility was not encountered in human tutoring sessions, but was a major component in computer-tutored sessions. Little gender-linking of hedging behavior was found, contrary to expectations based on prior studies. A weak gender-linked effect was found for affect in human tutored sessions.