Conversational Agent Design for Algebra Tutoring.

Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (CITS) in learning environments are capable of providing personalized instruction to students in different domains, to improve the learning process. This interaction between the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and the user is carried out through dialogues in natural language. In this study, we use an open source framework called Rasa to adapt the original button-based user interface of an algebraic/arithmetic word problem-solving ITS to one based primarily on the use of natural language. We conducted an empirical study showing that once properly trained, our conversational agent was able to recognize the intent related to the content of the student’s message with an average accuracy above 0.95.