AFFECT IN TUTORING DIALOGUES

This paper is about INES, an intelligent, multimodal tutoring environment, and how we build a tutor agent in the environment that tries to be sensitive to the mental state of the student that interacts with it. The environment was primarily designed to help students practice nursing tasks. For example, one of the implemented tasks is to give a virtual patient a subcutaneous injection. The students can interact multimodally using speech and a haptic device under the guidance of the virtual embodied tutor. INES takes into account elements of the student's character and an appraisal of the student's actions to estimate the mental state of the student. This information is used to plan and execute the actions and responses of the tutor agent.