An Intelligent Textbook that Answers Questions

Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook that answers students questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire uses knowledge representation of the conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer questions. Students ask questions by typing free-form natural language queries or by selecting passages of text. The system then attempts to answer the question and also generates suggested questions related to the query or selection. The questions supported by the system were chosen to be educationally useful, for example: what is the structure of X?; compare X and Y?; how does X relate to Y? In user studies, students found this question-answering capability to be useful while reading and while doing problem solving. In a controlled experiment, community college students using Inquire Biology outperformed students using either a hard copy or conventional E-book version of the same textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire, the prototype demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question-answering to electronic textbooks.