Expanding the Accessibility and Impact of Language Technologies for Supporting Education (TFlex): Edinburgh Effort

Dr. Myroslava Dzikovska, Prof. Johanna Moore, University of EdinburghSeptember 2004 – December 2010

Project Objective• Support large-scale deployment of language technology in learning

environments

• Allow educational experts to use language understanding capabilities in computer-supported learning environments

• e.g., automatically alert group facilitator when chat goes off topic

• Allow dialogue system developers to quickly and efficiently deploy tutorial dialogue systems in new domains

• support complex tasks like understanding student explanations

Navy Relevance• Support advanced computer-based training systems and improve

training effectiveness

• Allow for cost-effective deployment of language technology in a wide range of teaching and learning tools

Accomplishments• First 3 years of funding resulted in tools that speed up development of

language interpretation components, and improve their accuracy and efficiency

• E.g., increased the verb lexicon of the BEETLEII dialogue system from 1,000 to about 2,500 verbs entries by extracting 1,196 lexical entries from VerbNet lexical database

• Published 5 peer-reviewed papers

• Currently improving TFlex extraction tools by taking into account additional information available from the FrameNet lexicon

• Published 2 conference/workshop papers in 2008

Future plans• Develop tools for defining domain-specific terminology not found in

general databases• Integrate TFlex resources into BEETLE II tutorial dialogue system• Integrate TFlex tools and resources into computer-supported

collaborative learning environments

Technical Approach• Improve tools for educators through the use of more sophisticated

computational linguistics techniques

• Make language analysis tools more accessible through user-friendly interfaces (more detail in CMU effort)

• Improve language processing in tutorial dialogue systems by developing tools to rapidly expand their lexicons

• Unknown words cause language interpretation failures

• New words have to be added manually to each system, requiring significant computational linguistics expertise

• Extract information from large-scale public domain lexical databases and dictionaries

• Much of the necessary information is available from various sources, but requires merging and cleaning up to be usable

Screen shot of the TFlex Extractor Tool

Summary of extraction results

Issues detected and marked for cleanup

Expanding the Accessibility and Impact of Language Technologies for Supporting Education (TFlex extension): CMU Effort

Dr. Carolyn Rosé, Carnegie Mellon UniversitySeptember 2004 – December 2010

• Project Objective– Support large-scale deployment of language technology in

learning environments

• Language is crucial in many learning tasks, so improving language understanding will help improve learning

• Issues that need to be addressed to make language technology more accessible

– Existing tools require computational linguistics expertise, and are not accessible to educators or domain experts

– Systems in new domains are difficult to deploy because of limited coverage in existing tools

• Navy Relevance– Improved computer-based training tools will improve the

training effectiveness for the Navy

• Accomplishments – First 3 years of funding produced publically available tools

with a current user base of 219 in 49 countries, 10 peer reviewed publications, and 6 invited talks

– Completed version 1.0 of SIDE and Basilica, currently piloting

– 3 conference publications so far for 2008

• Future Plans– Preparing for a tutorial at CMU in July

– Collaborating with Dan Suthers, Nancy Law, and Nathan Dwyer on an workshop related to developing a community resource for analysis of collaborative learning data

– Further develop and disseminate our tools, work towards greater integration with Edinburgh technology

• Technical Approach– Extend the tools and techniques developed in Edinburgh

and CMU during FY2005-2007

– Specifically, building an infrastructure around basic tools developed during FY2005-2007 to facilitate rapid prototyping of dialogue-based learning environments

– Development effort so far has proceeded in two directions:

– Development of SIDE Summarization Integrated Development Environment, building on basic technology developed during FY2005-2007, to facilitate rapid development of reporting interfaces for facilitators of collaborative learning interactions

– Development of the Basilica framework for coordinating a conversation between multiple humans and multiple dialogue agents

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Screen shots from SIDE Summarization Integrated Development Environment