Discourse Processing for Explanatory Essays in Tutorial Applications

Abstract

The Why-Atlas tutoring system presents students with qualitative physics questions and encourages them to explain their answers via natural language. Although there are inexpensive techniques for analyzing explanations, we claim that better understanding is necessary for use within tutoring systems. In this paper we describe how Why-Atlas creates and utilizes a proof-based representation of student essays. We describe how it creates the proof given the output of sentence-level understanding, how it uses the proofs to give students feedback, some preliminary runtime measures, and the work we are currently doing to derive additional benefits from a proof-based approach for tutoring applications.