We present a conversational management act (CMA) annotation schema for one-to-one tutorial dialogue sessions where a tutor uses an analogy to teach a student a concept. CMAs are more fine-grained sub-utterance acts compared to traditional dialogue act mark-up. The schema achieves an inter-annotator agreement (IAA) Cohen Kappa score of at least 0.66 across all 10 classes. We annotate a corpus of analogical episodes with the schema and develop statistical sequence models from the corpus which predict tutor content related decisions, in terms of the selection of the analogical component (AC) and tutor conversational management act (TCMA) to deploy at the current utterance, given the student’s behaviour. CRF sequence classifiers perform well on AC selection and robustly on TCMA selection, achieving respective accuracies of 61.9% and 56.3% on a cross-validation experiment over the corpus.
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