A Machine Learning Approach to Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Anaphora resolution is a central topic in dialogue and discourse that deals with finding the referent of a pronoun. It plays a critical role in conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems ITSs as it can increase the accuracy of assessing students' knowledge level, i.e. mental model, based on their natural language inputs. Although anaphora resolution is one of the most studied problems in Natural Language Processing, there are very few studies that focus on anaphora resolution in dialogue based ITSs. To this end, we present Deep Anaphora Resolution Engine++ DARE++ that adapts and extends existing machine learning solutions to resolve pronouns in ITS dialogues. Experiments showed that DARE++ achieves a F-measure of 88.93%, proving the potential of the proposed method for resolving pronouns in student-tutor dialogues.

[1]  R. Mitkov ANAPHORA RESOLUTION: THE STATE OF THE ART , 2007 .

[2]  Massimo Poesio,et al.  Discourse Structure and Anaphora in Tutorial Dialogues: An Empirical Analysis of Two Theories of the Global Focus , 2006 .

[3]  Srinivas Bangalore,et al.  Interaction between dialog structure and coreference resolution , 2010, 2010 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop.

[4]  James F. Allen,et al.  CARDIAC: An Intelligent Conversational Assistant for Chronic Heart Failure Patient Heath Monitoring , 2009, AAAI Fall Symposium: Virtual Healthcare Interaction.

[5]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases , 2001, CL.

[6]  Michael Strube,et al.  A Machine Learning Approach to Pronoun Resolution in Spoken Dialogue , 2003, ACL.

[7]  Massimo Poesio,et al.  A General-Purpose, Off-the-shelf Anaphora Resolution Module: Implementation and Preliminary Evaluation , 2004, LREC.

[8]  Jian Su,et al.  Coreference Resolution in Biomedical Texts: a Machine Learning Approach , 2008, Ontologies and Text Mining for Life Sciences.

[9]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Recent Advances in Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems , 2013, AI Mag..

[10]  Yannick Versley,et al.  BART: A Modular Toolkit for Coreference Resolution , 2008, ACL.

[11]  Tat-Seng Chua,et al.  A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm , 2004, LREC.

[12]  Basilio Sierra,et al.  A First Machine Learning Approach to Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Basque , 2010, IBERAMIA.

[13]  Brent Morgan,et al.  The DARE Corpus: A Resource for Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems , 2014, LREC.

[14]  Guillermo Ricardo Simari,et al.  Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2010 , 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[15]  Richard Evans,et al.  A New, Fully Automatic Version of Mitkov's Knowledge-Poor Pronoun Resolution Method , 2002, CICLing.

[16]  Vasile Rus,et al.  DARE: Deep Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue based Intelligent Tutoring Systems , 2013, EDM.

[17]  Vasile Rus,et al.  Recommendations for the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring Based on the Development of the Deep Tutor Service , 2013, AIED Workshops.

[18]  Ted Briscoe,et al.  Statistical Anaphora Resolution in Biomedical Texts , 2008, COLING.

[19]  Vincent Ng,et al.  Unsupervised Models for Coreference Resolution , 2008, EMNLP.

[20]  Alexander Gelbukh,et al.  Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing , 2015, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.