Natural Language Dialog with a Tutor System for Mathematical Proofs

Abstract

Natural language interaction between a student and a tutoring or an assistance system for mathematics is a new multi-disciplinary challenge that requires the interaction of (i) advanced natural language processing, (ii) flexible tutorial dialog strategies including hints, and (iii) mathematical domain reasoning. This paper provides an overview on the current research in the multi-disciplinary research project Dialog, whose goal is to build a prototype dialog-enabled system for teaching to do mathematical proofs. We present the crucial sub-systems in our architecture: the input understanding component and the domain reasoner. We present an interpretation method for mixed-language input consisting of informal and imprecise verbalization of mathematical content, and a proof manager that supports assertion-level automated theorem proving that is a crucial part of our domain reasoning module. Finally, we briefly report on an implementation of a demo system.

This work has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Collaborative Research Center on Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes, SFB 378 ( http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/sfb378/).