Date of Award

1-31-2024

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.Sc.

Department

Computer Science

Keywords

ECA, Ontology, Personalized Tutoring System, POMDP

Supervisor

Xiaobu Yuan

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

E-tutoring systems have transformed remote learning and personalized education, offering potent tools for tailored instruction. The core of a personalized tutor lies in its robust ontology and knowledge base, working seamlessly to deliver captivating educational experiences. These two integral components collaborate to empower the tutor to discern learners’ needs, adapt content accordingly, and provide tailored guidance. This study introduces an automated approach for constructing an ontology utilizing publicly accessible datasets, aiming to enhance personalized tutoring through Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). The objective is to improve the tutoring encounter by delivering bespoke, domain-specific knowledge to learners. The approach harnesses natural language processing techniques to extract pertinent concepts and relationships from open-domain datasets. This extracted data is then leveraged to generate new ontology classes and enhance existing ones. This innovative methodology employs a comprehensive four-step algorithm to develop a domain ontology from a meta-ontology. This resultant ontology serves as a knowledge repository for ECAs, empowering them to provide individualized and contextually pertinent tutoring. This proposed approach presents an automated and scalable solution for constructing ontologies within educational environments.

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