Using Natural Language Processing to Analyze Tutorial Dialogue Corpora Across Domains and Modalities

Our research goal is to investigate whether previous findings and methods in the area of tutorial dialogue can be generalized across dialogue corpora that differ in domain (mechanics versus electricity in physics), modality (spoken versus typed), and tutor type (computer versus human). We first present methods for unifying our prior coding and analysis methods. We then show that many of our prior findings regarding student dialogue behaviors and learning not only generalize across corpora, but that our methodology yields additional new findings. Finally, we show that natural language processing can be used to automate some of these analyses.