Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

A new regret insertion heuristic for solving large-scale dial-a-ride problems with time windows

In this paper we present a parallel regret insertion heuristic to solve a dial-a-ride problem with time windows. A new route initialization procedure is implemented, that keeps into account both the spatial and the temporal aspects of the problem, and a regret insertion is then performed to serve the remaining requests. The considered operating scenario is representative of a large-scale dial-a-ride program in Los Angeles County. The proposed algorithm was tested on data sets of 500 and 1000 requests built from data of paratransit service in this area. The computational results show the effectiveness of this approach in terms of trading-off solution quality and computational times. The latter measure being especially important in large-scale systems where numerous daily requests need to be processe