The virtual tele-tASK professor

Abstract

This paper describes our e-librarian service that understands students' complete questions in natural language and retrieves very few but pertinent learning objects, i.e., short multimedia documents. The system is based on three key components: the formal representation of a domain ontology, a mechanism to automatically identify learning objects out of a knowledge source, and a semantic search engine that yields only pertinent results based on the freely formulated questions in natural language.We report on experiments about students' acceptance to enter complete questions instead of only keywords, and about the benefits of such a virtual personal teacher in an educational environment.