Why2000: A Dialogue-Based Explanation Tutoring System
The goal of the Why2000 project is to have students provide natural language answers to qualitative physics problems that are then followed up with a natural language dialogue in which the tutor provides feedback and attempts to correct recognizable misconceptions evident in the student's answer. This project is affiliated with CIRCLE, an NSF center for the study of tutoring.
Mission
The research project will:- develop tools for building tutoring systems that conduct explanation-based natural language dialogs
- use the tools to develop tutoring systems for at least two task domains, and
- evaluate their effectiveness compared to expert human tutors and to versions of the systems that use constrained language instead of natural language.
Our basic approach is to combine a shallow, statistical approach with deep, symbolic approaches. Although prototypes of these components have been developed in our earlier work, all require significant extensions to handle explanation-based tutorial dialogs. We believe our hybrid approach will yield both the robustness and depth of understanding that explanation-based tutorial dialogs require.
Sponsor
- Office of Naval Research (ONR) Cognitive Sciences Division.
People
Kurt VanLehn leads the University of Pittsburgh group, and Art Graesser leads the University of Memphis group.
The Pittsburgh group is under the daily direction of computational linguist, Pam Jordan. Our group members include:
- Moses Hall, Linguist & Programmer
- Uma Pappuswamy, Linguist
- Maxim Makatchev, Computer Scientist
- Michael Ringenberg, Graduate Student
- Min Chi, Graduate Student
Past Project Members:
- Dumisizwe Bhembe, Programmer
- Michael Boettner, Linguist
- Andy Gaydos, Graduate Student
- Carolyn Rosé, Computational Linguist
- Antonio Roque, Programmer
- Ramesh Srivastava, Physics Instructor
- Roy Wilson, Programmer
The Memphis group is organized into four subgroups, each led by one or more faculty members:
- LSA (Xiangen Hu and Peter Wiemer-Hastings)
- Tutorial Dialog and Natural Language Processing (Natalie Person and Peter Wiemer-Hastings)
- Empirical Evaluation (Natalie Person)
- Speech Recognition and Talking Heads (Xiangen Hu)
Publications
- Project Documents
- Atlas
- Auto Tutor
- Computer Modelling of Collaborative Problem-solving Dialogues
- Computer Modelling of Tutorial Dialogues
- ITS
- Latent Semantic Analysis
- Robust Parsing
- Tutoring Studies