SOME PHENOMENA HANDLED BY THE CIRCSIM-TUTOR VERSION 3 INPUT UNDERSTANDER
Michael Glass · 1998
The CIRCSIM-Tutor version 3 input understander is the module which will process student answers during a tutoring dialogue. We have transcripts of human tutors conducting such dialogues, as well as logs of students using earlier versions of the computer tutor. This paper addresses how the input understander handles some of the language phenomena we have observed. Even when the student is giving short answers to simple questions, the tutor must sometimes handle them as simple student initiatives. INTRODUCTION CIRCSIM-Tutor is an intelligent tutoring system intended to tutor medical students about a negative feedback loop for blood pressure regulation in the human body. CIRCSIM-Tutor is language-based. It instructs by carrying out a dialogue with the student in English. There are no diagrams, hypertext links, or pull-down menus. The student is first presented with a description of an event which disturbs blood pressure (e.g., a hemorrhage). The student then predicts the qualitative chan...