Semantics driven interaction using natural language in students tutoring

Abstract

The aim of this work is to introduce a semantic integration between an ontology and a chatbot in an Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to interact with students using natural language. The interaction process is driven by the use of a purposely defined ontology. In the ontology two types of conceptual relations are defined. Besides the usual relations, which are used to define the domain's structure, another type of relation is used to define the navigation schema inside the ontology according to the need of managing uncertainty. Uncertainty level is related to student knowledge level about the involved concepts. In this work we propose an ITS for the Java programming language called TutorJ. In our system a chatbot module manages the dialogue in a semantic way. It is capable to deal with the ontology, and also with a LSA-engine. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) technique is used to analyze the correctness of the student sentences to establish what concepts she knows. The whole system is explained and the attention is focused on the process for the creation of the correspondence between ontology concepts and student's answers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelborg 2007.