An affect-sensitive intelligent tutor: Adapting to student emotions based on human empathy

by Samuel Alexander

One of the established strengths of human tutors is their ability to recognise and adapt to the emotions of students. This is a skill that has traditionally been lacking from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs); despite their ability to intelligently model and adapt to aspects of the student?s cognitive state, ITSs are generally completely unable to detect or adapt to aspects of the student?s affective state. In response to this shortcoming, this book explores the exciting development of an emotion-sensitive ITS. With the empathy of effective human tutors as our blueprint, we investigate how an artificial tutor should adapt to the affective state of students. To inform the tutor?s adaptation to student affect, a novel method for student modelling and emotion-sensitive tutoring strategies has been developed using a fuzzy, case-based reasoning approach. As a validation of the feasibility of an emotion-sensitive tutoring system, we implement and test our method in an Affective Tutoring System (ATS) for counting and addition, Easy with Eve, featuring an empathetic animated pedagogical agent, Eve.

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name. For other authors of this name, see:

Samuel Alexander - Fantasy, Young Adult, Gay and Lesbian

Samuel Alexander - Philosophy, Sustainability

Samuel Alexander - 1859-1938, Philosophy