The authors discuss Guru, a conversational expert ITS. Guru is designed to mimic expert human tutors using advanced applied natural language processing techniques including natural language understanding, knowledge representation, and natural language generation.
Capturing the knowledge about existing systems and analysis and design of conceived systems requires an adequate methodology, which should be both formal and intuitive. Formality is required to maintain a coherent representation of the system under study, while the requirement that the methodology be intuitive stems from the fact that humans are the ultimate consumers of the knowledge. Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is a vehicle for knowledge representation and management that perfectly meets the formality and intuition requirements through a unique combination of graphics and natural language.