Many Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) aim to help students become better readers. The computational challenges involved are (1) to assess the students’ natural language inputs and (2) to provide appropriate feedback and guide students through the ITS curriculum. To overcome both challenges, the following non-structural Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been explored and the first two are already in use: word-matching (WM), latent semantic analysis (LSA, Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998), and topic models (TM, Steyvers & Griffiths, 2007). This article describes these NLP techniques, the iSTART (Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking, McNamara, Levinstein, & Boonthum, 2004) intelligent tutor and the related Reading Strategies Assessment Tool (R-SAT, Magliano et al., 2006), and how these NLP techniques can be used in assessing students’ input in iSTART and R-SAT. This article also discusses other related NLP techniques which are used in other applications and may be of use in the assessment tools or intelligent tutoring systems.
A Fuzzy Expert System Architecture for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: A Cognitive Mapping Approach