Language Learning: Challenges for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

We describe the challenges presented by the assessment and presentation of knowledge components in the language learning domain, with particular attention to vocabulary acquisition. This paper first discusses the fact that the meaning of words is not as well formalized as many topics in better-defined domains such as mathematics. There follows a comparison of the number of knowledge components in language to the much lower amounts in other domains. An Intelligent Tutoring System for language must adopt different presentation and assessment strategies to confront the specific challenges of the domain. We describe REAP, a system that confronts these issues, and present empirical results that demonstrate its effectiveness.