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Using Natural Language as Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Tutoring System

Jung, Sung-Young (2012) Using Natural Language as Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Tutoring System. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Knowledge used in an intelligent tutoring system to teach students is usually acquired from authors who are experts in the domain. A problem is that they cannot directly add and update knowledge if they don’t learn formal language used in the system. Using natural language to represent knowledge can allow authors to update knowledge easily. This thesis presents a new approach to use unconstrained natural language as knowledge representation for a physics tutoring system so that non-programmers can add knowledge without learning a new knowledge representation. This approach allows domain experts to add not only problem statements, but also background knowledge such as commonsense and domain knowledge including principles in natural language. Rather than translating into a formal language, natural language representation is directly used in inference so that domain experts can understand the internal process, detect knowledge bugs, and revise the knowledgebase easily. In authoring task studies with the new system based on this approach, it was shown that the size of added knowledge was small enough for a domain expert to add, and converged to near zero as more problems were added in one mental model test. After entering the no-new-knowledge state in the test, 5 out of 13 problems (38 percent) were automatically solved by the system without adding new knowledge.


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Details

Item Type: University of Pittsburgh ETD
Status: Unpublished
Creators/Authors:
CreatorsEmailPitt UsernameORCID
Jung, Sung-Youngbachclavier@hotmail.com
ETD Committee:
TitleMemberEmail AddressPitt UsernameORCID
Committee ChairLesgold, Alanal@pitt.eduAL
Committee MemberVanLehn, KurtKurt.Vanlehn@asu.edu
Committee MemberAshley, Kevinashley@pitt.eduASHLEY
Committee MemberHe, Daqinggaorenhepitt@126.com
Date: 1 February 2012
Date Type: Publication
Defense Date: 29 August 2011
Approval Date: 1 February 2012
Submission Date: 10 November 2011
Access Restriction: No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately.
Number of Pages: 101
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Schools and Programs: Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Intelligent Systems
Degree: PhD - Doctor of Philosophy
Thesis Type: Doctoral Dissertation
Refereed: Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords: knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, intelligent tutoring system. authoring system, physics problem solving
Related URLs:
Date Deposited: 01 Feb 2012 12:30
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2016 13:35
URI: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/6197

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