Interactive Knowledge Acquisition Tools: A Tutoring Perspective

Interactive Knowledge Acquisition Tools: A Tutoring Perspective Yolanda Gil (gil@isi.edu) and Jihie Kim (jihie@isi.edu) Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA Abstract This paper argues that interactive knowledge ac- quisition tools would beneﬁt from a tighter and more thorough incorporation of tutoring and learn- ing principles. Current systems learn from users in a very passive and disengaged manner, and could be designed to incorporate the proactive capabili- ties that one expects of a good student. This pa- per points out what tutoring and learning principles have been used to date in the acquisition literature, though unintentionally and implicitly. We discuss how a more thorough and explicit representation of these principles would help improve enormously how computers learn from users. Introduction Computers have long been considered an invaluable tool for education. Intelligent tutoring systems and other kinds of educational software show how people can acquire knowledge about diverse topics by inter- acting with a computer. Given our reliance in com- puters for the future of education, we need to realize that an important component of the human educa- tion revolution is the computer education revolution: anyone should be able to teach computers on topics that are of value, so that anyone can learn about those topics from computers. So an important ques- tion is: how will computers acquire knowledge? In most cases knowledge is entered by hand by software or knowledge engineers, as is often done in intelligent tutoring systems (Forbus & Feltovich, 2001). This limits severely the utility of the tools, as it would be more desirable that the people with expertise in the domain at hand would be the knowledge providers. Knowledge can also be extracted from text (Cowie & Lehnert, 1996), although given the error rates of state of the art systems and the kinds of knowledge they acquire (mostly instance-level information) it will take many years for these techniques to be of practical use to build an accurate body of knowl- edge about a topic domain. Another possibility is to use interactive knowledge acquisition tools that help users enter knowledge. In recent years these systems have shown that end users with no background in computer science or knowledge representation were able to enter sizeable amounts of knowledge (Kim & Gil, 1999; Eriksson et al, 1995; Clark et al, 2001). Although interactive knowledge acquisition tools enable end users to enter knowledge, users remain largely responsible for the acquisition process, both the teaching side and the learning side. These tools are quite passive in terms of formulating or pursuing learning goals, keeping track of the ﬂow of a lesson, and generally assess how much they are learning and how useful that knowledge is. At the same time, users are not necessarily skilled teachers by nature, so being in a position to teach a computer is al- ready a challenge for them. Interactive acquisition tools need to be more effective and helpful to users, perhaps by incorporating some of the skills that are expected of good students. And, as good students do, they should also be able to cope with an inexpe- rienced teacher (which their users are likely to be) and still learn from the experience by bringing to bear knowledge about how a good teacher typically goes about a lesson. An interactive acquisition tool could then be viewed as a tool to support augmented cognition, since it would supplement the user’s lim- itations as a teacher and knowledge engineer. The contributions of this work are twofold. First, we point out how existing knowledge acquisition tools use techniques that are related to widely used tutoring and learning principles. Second, we identify areas that the acquisition tools developed to date have neglected, and suggest promising areas of re- search based on our ﬁndings. This would result in a new generation of acquisition tools that are not only better students but also more helpful to the teacher (the user). The paper begins with a short introduction and background on interactive knowledge acquisition tools. We then discuss several tutoring and learn- ing principles that we have drawn from the educa- tional literature and that seem useful to support the interactive acquisition process. Next, we show how some existing acquisition tools use techniques that are related to these principles in some aspects of their functionality. We ﬁnalize with a discussion of promising directions that we see in designing acqui- sition tools that incorporate tutoring and learning principles more thoroughly.