Scaffolding Open Text Input in a Scripted Communication Skills Learning Environment

Abstract

Serious games, as well as entertainment games, often employ a scripted dialogue for player interaction with a virtual character. In our serious game Communicate, a domain expert develops a structured, scripted scenario as a sequence of potential interactions in an authoring tool. Communicate is widely used and several domain experts have already developed over a thousand scenarios. In the original version of Communicate, a student `navigates' a dialogue with a virtual character by clicking one of the multiple statement options at a step of a scenario. Open text response often requires more complex thinking from a student. In this paper we explore ways to handle open text input from a student at a step of a scenario. Our goal is to match open text to scripted statements using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) method and explore mechanisms to handle matched and unmatched input.