This work was supported by the Cognitive Science Program, Office of Naval Research under Grant No. The content does not reflect the position or policy of the government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. We have example transcripts of such dialog using both human and computer tutors. Even though the student is answering comparatively simple questions, we can observe a number of complicating phenomena, ranging from creative abbreviation to varied syntax.
Students also have habits such as hedging answers and giving appropriate but unexpected responses.
An important goal of the input understander is to recognize and correctly respond to some of these phenomena. The latest working version is version 2. This paper describes our intentions for version 3. The tutoring protocol has several phases. The phase of interest to us consists of tutoring dialog, where the student and the computer take turns communicating in written language.