Adaptive intelligent tutorial dialogue in the BEETLE II system

Abstract

In this interactive event we present Beetle II, a tutorial dialogue system designed to accept unrestricted language input and to support experimentation with different approaches to tutoring. Encouraging students to produce explanations and giving them detailed feedback is important for effective learning (e.g., [2]). But adding this capability to existing ITS remains a major challenge, due to the limitations of the existing natural language processing techniques. Statistical approaches like Latent Semantic Analysis have been used to interpret long student explanations. However, they require extensive pre-authoring, including anticipating a range of possible correct and incorrect answers, and manually recording tutor's feedback for every possible tutoring situation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.