Awareness Mechanisms for an Intelligent Tutoring System

In this work an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is pre-sented that is able to enrich its knowledge base, merg-ing both partially structured and unstructured informa-tion in a unique internal representation framework. The system gathers new information about the domain in re-sponse to both a curiosity mechanism and sensory stim-uli coming from the interaction with the user. The ar-chitecture is an evolution of TutorJ, an actual ITS al-ready presented by some of the authors. The cogni-tive framework is a very promising one to overcome the limitations of classical ITSs, and to achieve the stated goal. The use of cognitive architectures is intended for a double result: a lower effort for a knowledge-intensive activity like the construction of an ITS and better re-sults in terms of a rich interaction with students. In this framework the system is aware of its internal status, and a curiosity mechanism has been modeled to gather new knowledge from web sources that is integrated in the original knowledge base. The whole architecture is explained in detail, and the information fusion mecha-nisms are presented along with a simple case study