A Knowledge Acquisition System for Constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Building a domain model consumes a major portion of the time and effort required for building an Intelligent Tutoring System. Past attempts at reducing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck by automating the knowledge acquisition process have focused on procedural tasks. We present CAS (Constraint Acquisition System), an authoring system for automatically acquiring the domain model for non-procedural as well as procedural constraint-based tutoring systems. CAS follows a four-phase approach: building a domain ontology, acquiring syntax constraint directly from it, generating semantic constraints by learning from examples and validating the generated constraints. This paper describes the knowledge acquisition process and reports on results of a preliminary evaluation. The results have been encouraging and further evaluations are planned.