ITR : Tutoring scientific explanations via natural language dialogue

学术研究和市场都普遍认为，最有效的教育形式是专业的人类导师。人类导师和计算机导师之间的一个主要区别是，只有人类导师才能理解不受约束的自然语言输入。最近，一些与学生进行自然语言对话的辅导系统被开发出来。我们的研究问题是找到使基于自然语言的辅导系统更有效的方法。我们的基本方法是从人类教学对话的研究中获得新的对话策略，将其纳入基于语言的辅导系统，并确定它们是否使辅导系统更有效。例如，一些研究正在确定当人类导师被迫遵循某些策略时，学习是否会增加。为了将新的对话策略整合到我们现有的基于文本和口语的nl辅导系统中，我们正在开发两个全新的模块。一个新的模块将使用一个被称为解释网络的大型命题有向图来解释学生的话语，这是目前使用的知识的浅表示和深表示的中间。第二个新模块使用机器学习来改进对话管理策略的选择。因此，这项研究是一项多学科的努力，其智力价值在于人类辅导的认知心理学、自然语言处理技术和有效辅导系统设计方面的新成果。改进的基于人工智能的辅导系统可能会对教育和社会产生广泛的影响。

It is widely acknowledged, both in academic studies and the marketplace, that the most effective form of education is the professional human tutor. A major difference between human tutors and computer tutors is that only human tutors understand unconstrained natural language input. Recently, a few tutoring systems have been developed that carry on a natural language (NL) dialogue with students. Our research problem is to find ways to make NL-based tutoring systems more effective. Our basic approach is to derive new dialogue strategies from studies of human tutorial dialogues, incorporate them in an NL-based tutoring system, and determine if they make the tutoring system more effective. For instance, some studies are determining if learning increases when human tutors are constrained to follow certain strategies. In order to incorporate the new dialogue strategies into our existing text and spoken NL-based tutoring systems, two completely new modules are being developed. One new module will interpret student utterances using a large directed graph of propositions called an explanation network, which is halfway between the shallow and deep representations of knowledge that are currently used. The second new module uses machine learning to improve the selection of dialogue management strategies.The research is thus a multidisciplinary effort whose intellectual merit lies in new results in the cognitive psychology of human tutoring, in the technology of NL processing, and in the design of effective tutoring systems. Improved NL-based tutoring systems could have a broad impact on education and society.