Jordan, P. &
VanLehn, K. (2002). Discourse processing for explanatory essays in tutorial
applications. Proceedings of the 3rd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and
Dialogue.
The Why-Atlas tutoring system presents students with qualitative physics
questions and encourages them to explain their answers via natural language.
Although there are inexpensive techniques for analyzing explanations, we claim
that better understanding is necessary for use within tutoring systems. In
this paper we describe how Why-Atlas creates and utilizes a proof-based representation
of student essays. We describe how it creates the proof given the output
of sentence-level understanding, how it uses the proofs to give students
feedback, some preliminary runtime measures, and the work we are currently
doing to derive additional benefits from a proof-based approach for tutoring
applications.
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