Spoken Dialogs With a Virtual Science Tutor

My Science Tutor (MyST) is an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by elementary school students through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor in an interactive multimedia environment. Marni, a lifelike 3-D character, attempts to elicit self-expression from students, process their spoken explanations to assess understanding, and scaffold learning by asking open-ended questions accompanied by illustrations, animations or interactive simulations. MyST uses automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and dialog modeling technologies to interpret student responses and manage the dialog.