Viewing and analyzing multimodal human-computer tutorial dialogue: a database approach

It is easier to record logs of multimodal human-computer tutorial dialogue than to make sense of them. In the 2000-2001 school year, we logged the interactions of approximately 400 students who used Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor and who read aloud over 2.4 million words. We discuss some difficulties we encountered converting the logs into a more easily understandable database. It is faster to write SQL queries to answer research questions than to analyze complex log files each time. The database also permits us to construct a viewer to examine individual Reading Tutor-student interactions. This combination of queries and viewable data has turned out to be very powerful, and we discuss how we have combined them to answer research questions.