Automatic Detection of a Student’s Affective States for Intelligent Teaching Systems

AutoTutor is an automated computer tutor that simulates human tutors and holds conversations with students in natural language. Using data collected from AutoTutor, the following determinations were sought: Can we automatically classify affect states from intelligent teaching systems to aid in the detection of a learner’s emotional state? Using frequency patterns of AutoTutor feedback and assigned user emotion in a series of pairs, can the next pair of feedback/emotion series be predicted? Through a priori data mining approaches, we found dominant frequent item sets that predict the next set of responses. Thirty-four participants provided 200 turns between the student and the AutoTutor. Two series of attributes and emotions were concatenated into one row to create a record of previous and next set of emotions. Feature extraction techniques, such as multilayer-perceptron and naive Bayes, were performed on the dataset to perform classification for affective state labeling. The emotions ‘Flow’ and ‘Frustration’ had the highest classification of all the other emotions when measured against other emotions and their respective attributes. The most common frequent item sets were ‘Flow’ and ‘Confusion’.