A Machine Learning Approach to 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’ mental model based on their natural language inputs. Although the task of 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. Since ITSs are different from written texts and other spoken dialogues such as dialogues for airline ticket reservations, existing solutions are not directly useable. To this end, we present Deep Anaphora Resolution Engine (DARE++) that adapts and extends existing machine learning solutions to resolve pronouns in ITS dialogues. Experiment results show that it can achieve a F-measure over 88 %, showing a great potential for resolving pronouns in student-tutor dialogues.