Jordan, P., Rosé, C., & VanLehn, K. (2001) Tools for authoring tutorial dialogue knowledge. In J. D. Moore, C. L. Redfield, & W. L. Johnson (Eds.). AI in Education : AI-ED in the Wired and Wireless Future (pp. 222-233). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

The current generation of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have successfully produced learning gains without the use of natural language technology, but the goal for the next generation is to add natural language dialogue capabilities. Since it is already a tremendous effort to add domain and pedagogical knowledge to the current generation of ITSs, adding natural language dialogue capabilities can further increase the development time by requiring that language knowledge also be engineered. Rather than having natural language knowledge become an additional engineering burden, we seek to build tools that will allow us to attack the problem of pedagogical and language knowledge engineering in tandem. In this paper, we describe the authoring tool suite we are building to address this problem. We have found that our prototype tools do facilitate the rapid development of natural language dialogue interfaces for ITSs. With these tools we were able to build knowledge sources for our dialogue interface to an ITS in only 3 man months. The resulting dialogue system was able to hold natural language dialogues with students on 50 physics concepts and students showed significant learning gains over seeing only monologue text hints.

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