On Providing Natural Language Support for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (C-ITS) are capable of providing personalized instruction to students in different domains, using dialogues in natural language to interact with the user. In this paper we describe our recent experience in adapting an algebraic/arithmetic word problem-solving Intelligent Tutoring System by replacing the original button-based user interface by a conversational one primarily based on the use of natural language. The proposed method led to an average intent-recognition accuracy of 0.97, supporting the use of this kind of tools to seamlessly migrate existing interfaces to a more convenient form of interaction based on natural language.