Paraphrase identification is a core Natural Language Processing task that involves assessing the semantic similarity of two texts. To foster systematic studies of this task, standardized datasets were created on which various approaches could be compared more fairly. However, a better understanding and more precise operational definition of a paraphrase are needed before any further datasets or systematic evaluations of the task of paraphrase identification are proposed. This study develops the concept of paraphrasing as a writing strategy. Six types of paraphrases are defined through the creation of a relatively large corpus of student-generated paraphrases. These paraphrases are analyzed along several dozen linguistic dimensions ranging from cohesion to lexical diversity. The most significant indices from these dimensions were then used to build a prediction model that could identify true and false paraphrases and each of the six paraphrase types.

We revisit a framework for designing peer-based intelligent tutoring systems motivated by McCalla's ecological approach, where learning is facilitated by the previous experiences of peers with a corpus of learning objects. Prior research demonstrated the value of a proposed algorithm for modeling student learning and for selecting the most beneficial learning objects to present to new students. In this paper, we first adjust the validation of this approach to demonstrate its ability to cope with errors in assessing the learning of student peers. We then deepen the representation of learning objects to reflect the expected time to completion and demonstrate how this may lead to more effective selection of learning objects for students, and thus more effective learning. As part of our exploration of these new adjustments, we offer insights into how the size of learning object repositories may affect student learning, suggesting future extensions for the model and its validation.

This paper intends to demonstrate how Applicative and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (ACCG) can be drawn on to design powerful software applications for the teaching of languages. To this end, we present some modules from our “pictographic translator”, a software that performs syntactical analysis of sentences in natural language directly written by the user, and then dynamically displays series of pictograms that illustrate the words and structure of the user’s sentences. After a short presentation of our application and an introduction to ACCG, we will examine how this formalism enables the building of several high-level functions in our system, such as disambiguation, structure exhibition and grammatical correction/validation. We finally open a short discussion concerning the potential (and limits) of this architecture with regards to multilingualism.

List of the organizers and conference committees for FLAIRS-24, including special tracks.

The plurality of taxonomies, the group of researchers have attempted to make ITS differences amongst available features, and the techniques interactions more naturalistic and conversational. In order used have yielded a variety of approaches. Verbee et al. to accomplish this goal, researchers have analyzed corpora (2006) examined the features used by 16 dialogue act of human-human tutorial dialogues to better understand tagging studies and identified 24 features that have been both individual dialogue acts and patterns of acts that occur previously used. While an extensive discussion of these in human tutoring (Graesser & Person, 1994; Graesser, features is outside the scope of the present paper, the Person, & Magliano, 1995; Litman & Forbes-Riley, 2006; features fall loosely into four categories: word based (e.g.

This study examines the relation between the linguistic features of freewrites and human assessments of freewriting quality. This study builds upon the authors’ previous studies in which a model was developed based on the linguistic features of freewrites written by 9th and 11th grade students to predict freewrite quality. The current study reexamines this model using number of propositions as a predictor instead of number of words because the number of propositions was expected to be a better proxy for number of ideas in contrast to simple text length. The results indicated that there were only slight advantages for using a measure for number of propositions, indicating that from an artificial intelligence perspective, the number of words was the better measure.

Although freewriting strategies are commonly taught in composition courses, there have been few empirical studies on freewriting. We address this gap by examining effects of prior writing skills (as measured by a pre-write essay), freewriting training, text-box size (1, 10, 20 lines), and repetitive writing on freewriting quality. Participants watched an agent-based vicarious learning freewriting instruction video or a control video including brief instructions on freewriting. After training, participants wrote six freewrites, two in each box size. Lesson delivery and text box size did not affect expert human ratings of the freewrites. Furthermore, participants did not benefit from writing successive freewrites regardless of their initial skill level. We describe how these results have been used to inform the design of Writing-Pal, an essay-writing intelligent tutoring system.

Various strategies and techniques have been proposed for the generation of questions/answers tests in Intelligent Tutoring Systems by using OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontolo- gies. Currently there have been no known methods to utilize SWRL rules for this task. This paper presents a system and a set of strategies that can be used in order to automatically generate multiple choice questions from SWRL rules. The aim of the proposed framework is to support further research in the area and to be a testbed for the development of more advanced assessment techniques.

Thomas K. Landauer (Pearson Knowledge Technologies) The recently created word maturity (WM) metric uses the computational language model LSA to mimic the average evolutionary growth of individual word and paragraph knowledge as a function of the total amount and order of simulated reading. The simulator traces the separate growth trajectories of an unlimited number of different words from the beginning of reading to adult level.

This study investigates Serious Games (SG) to assess motivational factors appropriate to an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). An ITS can benefit from SG’ elements that can highly support learners’ motivation. Thus, identifying and assessing the effect that these factors may have on learners is a crucial step before attempting to integrate them into an ITS. We designed an experiment using a Serious Game and combined both the theoretical ARCS model of motivation and empirical physiological sensors (heart rate, skin conductance and EEG) to assess the effects of motivational factors on learners. We then identified physiological patterns correlated with one motivational factor in a Serious Game (Alarm triggers) associated with the Attention category of the ARCS model. The best result of three classifiers run on the physiological data has reached an accuracy of 73.8% in identifying learners’ attention level as being either above or below average. These results open the door to the possibility for an ITS to discriminate between attentive and inattentive learners.