Free text answers to short questions can reflect students' mastery of concepts and their relationships relevant to learning objectives. However, automating the assessment of free text answers has been challenging due to the complexity of natural language. Existing studies often predict the scores of free text answers in a "black box"…

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information-retrieval-based automatic question-answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random…

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sparked renewed interest in its potential to improve education. However, AI is a loose umbrella term that refers to a collection of methods, capabilities, and limitations--many of which are often not explicitly articulated by researchers, education technology companies, or other AI developers.…

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact "generative model"…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…