A VOICE-BASED e-EXAMINATION EXPERT SYSTEM FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING

Open and Distance learning (ODL) is a means of acquiring knowledge without necessarily being in normal direct communication with the instructor. The aim of ODL is to increase access to education and by extension online examination for those who have difficulty accessing education such as the poor, illiterate, less privileged, and those with location and financial constraints. Most electronic examination (e-examination) systems are web-based, and studies on the accessibility level of distance education show that webbased form of examination does not fully meet the needs of visually impaired persons. Voice-based systems allow users access to information on the internet over a phone interface. Prior studies on ODL e-examination systems that make use of voice user interface do not sufficiently exhibit intelligent form of assessment, which diminishes the rigour of examination. The objective of this project is to improve on the achievements of previous studies by providing a voice-based e-examination expert system for ODL that demonstrates shuffling of examination questions to learners. The study employs a combination of technologies such as system design and modeling using Unified Modeling Language (UML), server side scripting, voice-based system development, data management and rule-based reasoning in order to develop a prototype voice-based eexamination expert system for ODL. The developed system was evaluated to determine the level of performance and usability. The result of the usability evaluation showed that the developed application has an ‘average usability’ rating of 3.48 out of 5 scales. The performance evaluation of the system using Paradigm for Dialogue System Evaluation (PARADISE) gave a score of 4.78 on a scale of 5 as the maximum. This shows that the voice-based e-examination system will not only complement the existing web-base

Generating expository dialogue from monologue: Motivation, corpus and preliminary rules

Generating expository dialogue from monologue is a task that poses an interesting and rewarding challenge for Natural Language Processing. This short paper has three aims: firstly, to motivate the importance of this task, both in terms of the benefits of expository dialogue as a way to present information and in terms of potential applications; secondly, to introduce a parallel corpus of monologues and dialogues which enables a data-driven approach to this challenge; and, finally, to describe work-in-progress on semi-automatic construction of Monologueto-Dialogue (M2D) generation rules

Designing Interfaces to Support Collaboration in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval systems should acknowledge the existence of collaboration in the search process. Collaboration can help users to be more effective in both learning systems and in using them. We consider some issues of viewing interfaces to information retrieval systems as collaborative notations and how to build systems that more actively support collaboration. We describe a system that embodies just one kind of explicit support; a graphical representation of the search process that can be manipulated and discussed by the users. By acknowledging the importance of other people in the search process, we can develop systems that not only improve help-giving by people but which can lead to a more robust search activity, more able to cope with, and indeed exploit, the failures of any intelligent agents used

Applications of Expert Systems in Transport

BACKGROUND Experienced judgement and specialist knowledge are essential to the proper specification, understanding and interpretation of data and computer analyses. The human expert has traditionally supplied this knowledge and judgement with the computer doing the necessary number-crunching. However, artificial intelligence (AI) research provides ways of embodying this knowledge and judgement within computer programs. Despite an early lead in the field, UK research and developmnent into AI techniques was held back in the 1970s when the then Science Research Council took the view that the 'combinatorial explosion' of possibilities would be an insurmountable obstacle to AI developent. But in America and Japan research continued, and the surge of interest in the 1980s has been a consequence of the 'Fifth Generation Computer' research programme initiated by Japan (Feigenbaum and McCorduck; 1984). This led in Europe to the ESPRIT programme of advanced technology research, and in the UK to the Alvey programme (Department of Industry, 1982). As a result, all sectors of industry have been encouraged to consider how such advanced technology can be applied, and the transport industry is no exception. This paper sets out to explain some of the relevant techniques in simple terms, and to describe a number of situations in which transport planning and operations might be helped through their use, illustrating this by reference to the pioneering work going on in transport applications in the USA, Britain and Australia

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)