Proactive Acquisition from Tutoring and Learning Principles

Knowledge acquisition interfaces can be seen as students learning new knowledge from the user (teacher), and we believe that they should be able to use some of the strategies that good learners pursue during a tutoring dialogue. This will help acquisition interfaces become proactive learners, able to reason about learning activities and with initiative in participating in the process accordingly. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a new acquisition dialogue tool called SLICK that is built based on the tutoring and learning principles we have compiled. SLICK makes use of these principles through 1) goals that represent what remains to be learned, 2) strategies to achieve these goals and acquire further knowledge, and 3) awareness of the current status of the body of knowledge learned. The tool has been used for acquiring two very different types of knowledge: biological process models and military plans. The resulting interactions show that the system is aware of its progress towards acquiring the new knowledge, and moves forward by understanding what acquisition goals and strategies to pursue.