Widening the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Pramuditha Suraweera, PhD Student

Dept of CSSE, University of Canterbury

Mon Apr 16 11:00:00 NZST 2007 in Room 101, Erskine Building (MSCS)

Abstract

Developing Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), which are effective tools for education, is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the development effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that accounts for the system's intelligence. This seminar presents CAS, an authoring system capable of producing a domain model with the assistance of a domain expert. Unlike previous authoring systems, this system has the ability to acquire knowledge for non-procedural as well as procedural tasks. CAS expects the domain expert to provide an ontology of the domain, example problems and their solutions. It uses machine learning techniques to reason with the information provided by the domain expert for generating a domain model.

The seminar also presents results of a series of evaluation studies that produced promising results. The initial evaluation revealed that the task of composing an ontology of the domain assisted with the manual composition of a domain model. The second study showed that CAS was effective in generating constraints for the three vastly different domains of database modelling, data normalisation and fraction addition. The final study demonstrated that CAS was also effective in generating constraints when assisted by novice ITS authors, producing constraint sets that were over 90% complete.