Open AccessInquire Biology: A Textbook that Answers Questions
Author(s) -
Chaudhri Vinay K.,
Cheng Britte Haugan,
Overholtzer Adam,
Roschelle Jeremy,
Spaulding Aaron,
Clark Peter,
Greaves Mark,
Gunning Dave
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
ai magazine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.597
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 2371-9621
pISSN - 0738-4602
DOI - 10.1609/aimag.v34i3.2486
Subject(s) - reading (process) , representation (politics) , question answering , computer science , inference , knowledge representation and reasoning , selection (genetic algorithm) , mathematics education , artificial intelligence , psychology , linguistics , philosophy , politics , political science , law
Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook — one that answers students' questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire Biology provides unique capabilities through a knowledge representation that captures conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer students' 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 extremely useful while reading and while doing problem solving. In an initial controlled experiment, community college students using the Inquire Biology prototype outperformed students using either a hard copy or conventional ebook version of the same biology textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology, the initial prototype clearly demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question‐answering technology to electronic textbooks.