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.