20i 0 2nd international Conference on Education Technology and Computer (ICETC)

The Application of AI Technology in Intelligent Tutoring System

DuLi Lin Zhuying* Yin Bing

College of Math and Computer Science College of Math and Computer Science College of Math and Computer Science
Guizhou Normal University Guizhou Normal University Guizhou Normal University
Guiyang, China Guiyang, China Guiyang, China
duli311@163.com zhuying_Iin@126.com andy-yb@163.com

Abstract- Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is the result of the
application of artificial intelligence in education. This paper
briefly introduced the concept of ITS; detailed its structure of
modules and features; and focused on the application of AI
technology; several trends of ITS development were analyzed
in the end.
Keywords-Artificial Intelligence (AI); Intelligent Tutoring
System (ITS); Trends
replace the human teachers and to achieve the best teaching
by letting the computer system be the guide and helper of
learners, that to give your computer intelligence.
Researchers have different viewpoints on the structure of
ITS. More domestic scholars agree on the four modules
theory namely, that a typical ITS system has four main
components: domain knowledge base, student model, tutor
model and intelligent interface. (Shown as Figure 1)
...................

I. INTRODUCTION

Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is an important Student

Interface
research area in which computer science and technology are
used in education. It plays an important role in that with
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, in the absence of
guidance from the human tutors to help learners acquire
knowledge and skills. Since 1970s, many countries and
Teacher
regions have attached the great importance to intelligent Interface
tutoring systems research, development and application, and
had made great achievements. However, with in-depth
research, many problems began to surface. For example, in Domain
the traditional ITS, the student is the passive recipients of Knowledge Intelligent
teaching content. it lacks an interaction between systems and Interface
the students. In addition, the traditional ITS model of the
learners is not very successful, either too complicated to be Figure I ITS structure

handled, or too simple that it lacks practical value. Thus, in

the late of 1990s, ITS researchers began to reconsider the
application of artificial intelligence in ITS. Many new
technologies have been applied to ITS, including multimedia,
Internet-based distributed education, hypermedia technology.
However, the introduction of new technology does not
reduce the importance of artificial intelligence in teaching,
on the contrary, these new technologies is of practical
significance only when combined with artificial intelligence.
This paper focuses on the application of artificial intelligence
technology in ITS by describing the structure and function of
intelligent tutoring system, and discusses several
development trends of ITS.
II. THE MODEL OF BASIC STRUCTURE OF ITS
ITS is always the core content of artificial intelligence in
education (AIED), this system has the flexibility to represent
the teaching materials according to the features of cognitive
characteristics of students and current level of knowledge
and the ability to response to different needs of students,
realizing systematical intelligence by providing the teaching
strategies of "teaching according the information of
students". Thus the ultimate goal of ITS research is to
*Corresponding author
A. Domain Knowledge Base
As an important component of ITS, domain knowledge
base is to address the question of "what to teach" by
integrating multimedia database with artificial intelligence
techniques. Its functions are as follow: as the source of all
the knowledge of system, to be frequently called by other
modules to fulfill user behavior response in real-time, by
using the knowledge base to generate the appropriate issues,
tasks, and interpretation; through synchronization questions
and the comparison between expected student behavior and
actual student behavior to assess their mastery of knowledge
and learning status, learning style preferences, and so on.
Domain knowledge base can also lead the sharing of
teaching resources to carry out updating and refmement of
knowledge, in order to reduce a large number of
modification works of script design and maintenance. In fact,
knowledge representation is the primary problem which all
the AI techniques and intelligent systems must tackle first.
B. Student Model
Student model is the core component of ITS related to
the issue of "who is learning". Its functions are as follow:

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 20i 0 2nd international Conference on Education Technology and Computer (ICETC)
According to the student model and domain knowledge base
to modeling the current student; to provide information for
the decision-making of teaching modules; to maintain the
established student model. Therefore, the student model is to
implement the personalization and adaptive teaching. With
the research of student model, a variety of student model
construction methods has been advanced. There are three
common student models:
1) Overlay Model
This model is the knowledge of students as a subset of
expert knowledge. In view of this model does not take into
account the students may have a defect beyond the scope of
domain knowledge to produce the following correction
model.
2) Deviation Model
The model can track the differences between students'
knowledge and domain knowledge, and register the students'
knowledge blank and misconception. (Shown as Figure 2)
Students' know ledge Domain Knowledge
A.
Figure2 Deviation Model
Knowledge blank is the knowledge in domain knowledge
base but the student does not know, and misconception is the
error knowledge not in the domain knowledge base but the
students have. Another misconception is usually placed in a
library, called the error database.
3) Bayesian Networks
Bayesian network based on students interact with the
intelligent tutoring system to speculate the statistics of
students knowledge. In the network each node has a
probability value to indicate the possibility that the students
understand the corresponding knowledge point.
e. Tutor Model
The module's main function is to how to organize the
teaching content, that is, solve the problem of "how to teach".
Main functions: to provide students with the learning
environment, to guide students in learning activities, to
explain the phenomena, processes and reasons, to provide
help and learning materials for students, monitoring and
evaluating Students' learning activities.
This module arrive intelligent teaching methods and
teaching strategies according to the students' learning model
and through the intelligent system of search and reasoning,
An ITS should encompass a variety of teaching strategies,
the system according to the needs of schools, choose a
different teaching strategies generated showing the relevant
parts of the teaching content and how to send the
decision-making.
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D. Intelligent Interface
This is the modules that system communicates with users,
human-machine interface is divided into teacher and student
interface, its function is that experts and users input
information were translated into the form of content that
system can accept, while experts and users input information
were converted to the form of easy to understand for human.
Most of the teaching system using the graphical user
interface (GUI) or natural language communication interface,
or both. Teaching system in the design of the user interface
should pay attention to the graphic simulation fidelity,
user-friendliness and so on.
III. THE ApPLICATION OF AI TECHNOLOGY IN ITS
We have already discussed the main structure and
function of ITS, and now we look at several key technologies
in which the application of AI.
Knowledge Representation provide strong support for
domain knowledge base
Knowledge organization was good or bad, which is the
success of ITS plays a decisive role. Good knowledge
representation can not only reasonable and effective manner
with the field of knowledge organization, but also provide
information for the system queries, can also help students
develop a clear concept of relationship, to establish a good
structure of knowledge and improve problem-solving ability.
The knowledge in ITS can be divided into domain
knowledge (referring to the factual knowledge) and
experiential knowledge (referring to the process of
knowledge). Domain knowledge is mainly the course content
to teach, experiential knowledge is teaching experience
which were accumulated by teachers in the teaching process.
For these two types of knowledge, the former adopting a
cognitive hypertext knowledge representation, specifically
the knowledge representation is composed of a data structure,
the knowledge technology is used to determine the
knowledge elements, organizational computer access and
inference of knowledge of data structural form, and to design
based on the cognitive theory , namely hypertext theory; the
latter production rule-based knowledge representation
method, it can also defme sexual knowledge and process
knowledge, and these two different characteristics of
knowledge can expressed in a unified form. In addition, there
are commonly used means of knowledge representation as
semantic network and logical notation. The former applies to
the defmition and expression of sexual knowledge, can easily
describe the various physical entities of the semantic
relationships; the latter is very suitable for language teaching
system of knowledge representation, the logic of the
mechanism can be used to operate all its content.
B. Intelligent Agent technology applies to student model
and tutors model
Intelligent Agent technology is a new and advanced
technology in the artificial intelligence field of computer
science. It is the entity which is able to dynamically
 20i 0 2nd international Conference on Education Technology and Computer (ICETC)
changing independent continuously, can operate in other
agent of the environment, and can interact with the
environment.
Students can use the agent as guidance to look for
effective knowledge, since it has a learning function that can
fmd and collect the needed infonnation initiatively and
efficiently from the Internet for users. In addition, in
"intelligent navigation" browsing, you can also use
"intelligent agent" technology to replace teachers to guide
learning and search learning. Therefore, it helps to solve
some problems as using a single keyword matching queries,
the search engines due to the emergence of a large number of
irrelevant infonnation, infonnation retrieval accuracy not
high and so on.
Multi-agent technology is a revolutionary technology for
ITS. In fact, teaching is a very complex process. It can not be
a result of an isolated entity, but only able to rely on the
complementary functions of the interaction of mUltiple
intelligent agent cooperation to complete. Therefore, ITS
based on distributed multi-agent has been a great application
in the education of network.
C. The teaching strategy selection under the inference
engine
The main module of ITS is the tutor model, the role of
the tutor model is mainly achieved by intelligent inference
engine , and the inference engine can be based on students
learning model provides learners in the past records and
current learning state to carry out reasoning, to select or
access to appropriate teaching strategies. The structure is
shown in Figure 3.
Super rules
Choose Fixed
Match
Rule storage
Figure3 Inference Engine
The tutor model processing infonnation is inevitably
affected by some uncertainty factors as fuzziness,
randomness, non-reliability and so on, so uncertainty
reasoning methods are adopted generally. Commonly
uncertainty reasoning methods are subjective bays methods,
non-numerical semantic description method, the possibility
theoretical methods based on fuzzy set theory, belief network
approach and relational methods.
D. Machine learning provides an automatic knowledge
acquisition
The tutor models in any ITS will inevitably use the
machine learning techniques. For example, ITS want to
summarize students' problem-solving style from a large
number of answers, you must use machine learning
techniques. The purpose of machine learning is that the
infonnation in databases and infonnation systems will be
automatically extracted and converted into knowledge, and
automatically added to the domain knowledge base. The
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nature of this transfonnation due to learning strategies the
system used. Some basic learning strategies are memory
learning, teaching learning, deductive learning, inductive
learning, analogical learning, etc. Some technologies in the
field of machine learning techniques can be applied to
intelligent teaching include: neural networks, learning based
on statistical, inductive logic programming, data mining and
so on.
E. Natural Language Understanding to facilitate
man-machine interactive function
In many ITS Intelligent interface module, the use of
character recognition, speech recognition, natural language
understanding technologies to allow students to use natural
language and "smart teachers" for man-machine dialogue.
Natural language understanding is that the students and the
interface part of the ITS. Can the students easily in natural
language questions to the intelligent tutoring systems, ITS
can give out the grammatical structure of natural language
interpretation is ITS important issues to be resolved, in a
sense, natural language interface is the success of ITS
whether or not one of the keys.
In the intelligent interface module, the research results of
a variety of natural language processing technology can be
combined to improve the system's intelligence level. For
example, through natural language man-machine interface
more convenient to carry out human-computer interaction;
can use semantic web technology to achieve the level of the
relationship between the knowledge points and complexity
of the semantics of links; can be intelligent fuzzy query
technology knowledge base in search of knowledge and use;
can make use of machine translation technology, knowledge
of cross-language learning.
IV. DEVELOPMENT TREND
With a variety of techniques and artificial intelligence
applications development in many fields the intelligent
tutoring systems are also constantly improved. Which the
very worthy of attention are:
• To create ITS ontology to organize and promote the
concept of intelligent tutoring system
co-construction.
• To develop intelligent tutoring system architecture
classification and mapping applications.
• Increase teaching agent and virtual humans' research.
• The promotion of team training research and
prototype development.
• The continued development of intelligent tutoring
system and authoring system.
Apart from the above trend away from, online
collaborative learning, serious games and interactive
narrative learning environments, adaptive learning support
systems are the intelligent tutoring system for opening up
new territories in recent years.
A. Support Online Collaborative Learning
In recent years, with the development of E-Learning,
support online collaborative learning become to a hot spot of
ITS research. Collaborative learning is the way that some
 2010 2nd International Conference on Education Technology and Computer (ICETC)

students to help each other to jointly solve the problems with
no teacher intervention. The part of supporting online
collaboration learning, ITS research is focused on
intelligence support to the team training. The research in this
area in the early study of intelligent tutoring system is very
limited, more in computer-supported collaborative learning
(CSCL) studies. On-line collaborative learning is usually
present with low participation rates and low exchange rates.
Therefore, to enhance visualization of the team, in support of
equality and mutual benefit teaching and team members are
adaptability. It is this ability of dynamic strain to the
technology of artificial intelligence from the other separate
from nature. ITS as a new teaching model, there are many
issues to be explored and resolved, should step up research
efforts to learn the advanced experience at home and abroad,
from the actual situation, actively practice, dare to explore,
so ITS can really play to their teaching function better serve
the teaching service.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

all intelligent matching, etc. need to be further solved.
B. Serious Games and Narrative Learning Environment
Serious games (SG) are usually a kind of look and feel of
the game for the reality of the event or process simulation,
whose main purpose is to train or educate users. The
narrative learning environment (NLE) is a special kind of
narrative as the main means of communication with the
intelligent learning environment. SG or NLE with the
advantage that a common learning environment does not
have: In order to provide learners with a real-world
simulation and emulation, at the same time be able to
This work is supported by The Design of Intelligent
Educational Game in Network Course Learning Platform,
under the project of Graduate Innovation Foundation of
Guizhou Normal University, and The Research of The
Realistic Graphics Technology in Virtual Lab, under the
project of Natural Science Foundation of Technology Office,
Guizhou Province.
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v. CONCLUSIONS

In the discussion that ITS is not difficult to be found, in

the ITS and its development prospects are involved in
artificial intelligence technology, artificial intelligence
technology will play a tremendous role in promoting
development. Should be focused on artificial intelligence is a
scientific tool for modeling the real world, this feature, make
good use of this tool to research, development and
manipulation able to demonstrate "teaching" and "study"
two essential features of the formal model, and that these
model is able to perceive the fact that the new learning and
reasoning, and ultimately has a human-like dynamic

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