Osami Kagawa

Advanced database functions for distance education system: VIEW Classroom

We have been developing an important application of distributed systems: a distance education system called VIEW Classroom. Conventional distance education systems use video images of teachers and selected students when required. From its initial stages, this system has taken a non-video base (although video function can be utilized) and tried to use database technology extensively in order to assist the whole range of teaching and learning activities. Typical features of VIEW Classroom are presented. (1) Asynchronous interaction support: many conventional education systems are based on synchronous interaction, though asynchronous interaction can be also realized by object oriented database functions. (2) Database views: teacher and student can see different teaching materials if required. (3) Question-answer database: in order to answer questions issued by students, previously asked questions are stored together with corresponding answers in question-answer databases for such a purpose. (4) Database to analyze student achievement: we store abstracted information of student actions during the lecture, which can be used to improve the teaching material. The database can be regarded as a kind of temporal database which also stores past achievement data on each student. Extensive use of such database technology is a promising way for next generation distance education systems.

Applying Language Engineering Techniques to the Question Support Facilities in VIENA Classroom

VIENA Classroom is a distance education system in which the teaching material is prepared as hypermedia documents and presented to the students within a CSCW environment. By applying language engineering techniques to the question support facilities of the system we create a multimodal natural language interface so that the students can formulate their questions directly in Japanese. Based on the computed semantic representations the questions are either answered by accessing a FAQ knowledge base or collected and transferred to the teacher for later processing. As valuable assistance for formulating questions we provide the possibility to browse through automatically generated FAQ lists. Language engineering is performed in an integrated framework by utilizing deductive object-oriented database technology.

Syntactic Disambiguation by Using Categorial Parsing in a DOOD Framework

We present a natural language interface for Japanese that relies on semantically driven parsing in that it applies syntactic analysis only if necessary for disambiguation. For this purpose we utilize a categorial parser which also analyzes incomplete or ungrammatical input efficiently. The complete linguistic analysis is performed by means of deductive object-oriented database (DOOD) technology so that we achieve an integrated framework with the target application. The interface has been applied successfully to the question support facilities of the VIENA Classroom hypermedia teaching system.

Capturing essential questions using question support facilities in the VIEW classroom

The paper describes a concept and facilities of the VIEW Classroom, a distance education system supporting interactions between a teacher and students. In a classroom a basic interaction between them is performed by questions and answers. In distributed education systems such an one-to-many interaction frequently implies difficulties in selecting by a teacher essential questions, and causes overload of a teacher and delays in the answering. The VIEW Classroom System provides a facility for the teacher to specify key phrases associated with locations of the teaching material. These phrases can be referred by students in their questions. A teacher can select essential students1 problems from a list of questions ordered either by the predefined priority or by the frequency of questions. To avoid delays in answering questions the system provides a question support facility which makes possible to answer some questions automatically, by reusing previous answers to similar questions. The VIEW Classroom System provides a question accumulation mechanism and a graphical user interface.