CAREER: Automatic Knowledge Acquisition for Natural Language Interfaces to Educational Applications

这是一个教师早期职业发展（Career）奖。该项目旨在为下一代智能辅导系统开发自然语言接口的基本原则。教学和教育应用程序的自然语言接口既需要关于如何在领域中行动的知识，也需要关于如何谈论在领域中行动的交流知识。该项目旨在克服自然语言接口的领域依赖性，这种依赖性使它们无法移植到其他领域。它将通过两种方式实现这一目标。首先，研究将阐明领域依赖和领域独立通信策略的区别。其次，它将开发一种方法、算法和工具，以半自动地从文本和对话中获得领域和通信知识。这项工作的一个创新方面是动作动词的词汇语义在获取以动作图式表示的领域知识方面所起的作用。本研究涉及的教学领域之一是计算机科学。事实上，这项工作涉及辅导系统，通过课堂评估和本科生参与研究，将工作的研究和教育组成部分结合起来。该奖项旨在表彰和支持有可能成为21世纪学术领袖的教师学者的早期职业发展活动。这项研究的成功将有助于构建改进的计算机化教师，并推动自然语言处理领域的发展。一个具体的教育重点是在本科和研究生阶段指导妇女，并支持女孩选择科学和工程作为职业。

This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The project is designed to develop fundamental principles for natural language interfaces for the next generation of intelligent tutoring systems. Natural language interfaces to instructional and educational applications need both knowledge about how to act in a domain and communication knowledge about how to talk about acting in the domain. This project seeks to overcome the domain dependence of natural language interfaces that prevents them from being portable to other domains. It will accomplish this in two ways. First, the research will elucidate the difference between domain dependent and domain independent communication strategies. Second, it will develop a methodology, algorithms and tools to semi-automatically derive domain and communication knowledge from text and dialogues. An innovative aspect of this work is the role played by the lexical semantics of action verbs to acquire domain knowledge represented as action schemas. Among the instructional domains addressed by this research is computer science. The fact that the work concerns tutoring systems integrates the research and education components of the work, through class evaluation and undergraduate participation in research.This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. Success in this research will enable the construction of improved computerized tutors, as well as advancing the general field of natural language processing. A specific educational focus is mentoring women at the undergraduate and graduate level, and supporting girls in choosing science and engineering as a career.