Non-intrusive Assessment of Learners’ Prior Knowledge in Dialogue-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

This article describes a study whose goal was to assess students’ prior knowledge level with respect to a target domain based solely on characteristics of the natural language interaction between students and conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). We report results on data collected from two conversational ITSs: a micro-adaptive-only ITS and a fully-adaptive (micro- and macro-adaptive) ITS. These two ITSs are in fact different versions of the state-of-the-art conversational ITS DeepTutor (http://www.deeptutor.org).