Research

Current tools for interactive knowledge capture have little or no learning aptitude. They are mostly oblivious to the process or strategy that the user may be following in entering new knowledge, unaware of their progress during a session, and ignorant of typical skills expected from a good student. A user has to make up for these shortcomings by tracking the status, progress, potential problems, and possible courses of action themselves. We present an approach to make acquisition interfaces more proactive by extending them with: 1) goals that represent what remains to be learned, 2) strategies to achieve these goals and acquire further knowledge, and 3) awareness of the current status of the body of knowledge learned. The resulting interaction shows that the system is aware of its progress towards acquiring the new knowledge, and moves forward by understanding what acquisition goals and strategies to pursue.

• Analyzed the literature on tutorial dialogues and compiled useful principles that students and teachers typically follow in making tutoring/learning interactions successful. The result of this work is presented in the ITS-2002 paper (in proceedings of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference)
  
• Examined what tutoring and learning principles have been used to date in the acquisition literature, though unintentionally and implicitl and how a more thorough and explicit representation of these principles would help improve enormously how computers learn from users. CogSci-2002 paper (in proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)
  
• Developed an approach to make acquisition interfaces more proactive by extending them with: 1) goals that represent what remains to be learned, 2) strategies to achieve these goals and acquire further knowledge, and 3) awareness of the current status of the body of knowledge learned. A prototype KA dialog system for acquiring military plans is described in slides