The Beetle project is a collaboration between the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and NAWCTSD Orlando.
Our primary research area is in using natural language dialogue for educational applications. We are looking at two main types of questions:
- What role does language play in learning, both in human-human and human- computer interaction?
- How can we build computer systems that use natural language dialogue to facilitate learning?
Our ultimate goal is to build systems that support learners in building up their conceptual knowledge, and provide individualized feedback adapted to various features of the interaction, including the student's performance, metacognitive, and affective states. To achieve it, we have carried out studies of human-human tutoring interaction and built language-enabled tutorial dialogue systems and evaluated them with real users.
Our current area of work is the Beetle II tutorial dialogue system, a tutorial dialogue system in basic electricity and electronics domain which tutors students by asking them to explain their reasoning in their own words. The system has been successfully evaluated in a user trial with 80 naive users, proving that student's knowledge improves after interaction with the Beetle II tutor.
Our work on the Beetle II system focuses on identifying the features of the interaction that most affect student learning and satisfaction with the system, and improving the system's natural language understanding techniques. We are also investigating the impact of the input modality (spoken vs. typed) at the student's interaction with the system.