EXTRACTING INFORMATION FROM NATURAL LANGUAGE INPUT TO AN INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM

We have constructed a new module to process student natural language input to CIRCSIM-Tutor, an intelligent tutoring system designed to help medical students learn to solve problems involving the negative feedback process that regulates blood pressure in the human body. CIRCSIM-Tutor spends most of its time engaging the student in a natural language-based dialogue. The new input understander uses an information extraction approach that is robust enough to handle free- form student input. We describe an evaluation of CIRCSIM-Tutor by forty-two students at Rush Medical College, with particular emphasis on the performance of the input understander.