Social Science and Policy Studies
	TOWARDS A VIRTUAL TEACHING ASSISTANT TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ASKED BY STUDENTS IN INTRODUCTORY COMPUTER SCIENCE Cecily Heiner PhD Candidate School of Computing, University of Utah Monday, August 17th , 2009 10:30am-11:30am Campus Center Mid-Century room Abstract : Students in introductory programming classes often articulate their questions and information needs incompletely. Consequently, the automatic classification of student questions to provide automated tutorial responses is a challenging problem. I analyze a set of 411 questions from an introductory Java programming course by reducing the natural language of the questions to a vector space, and then utilizing cosine similarity to identify similar previous questions. I report classification accuracies between 23% and 56%, obtaining substantial improvements by exploiting domain knowledge (compiler error messages) and educational context (assignment name). My results are especially timely and relevant for online courses where students are completing the same set of assignments asynchronously and access to staff is limited. ____ Cecily Heiner is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, natural language processing, human computer interaction, intelligent tutoring, and machine learning. For her dissertation, she built and evaluated a tool to provide automated answers to common questions in introductory computer science(advisor Joe Zachary). Prior to beginning her PhD, she was a Masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Jack Mostow and Joseph Beck to improve the Project LISTEN reading tutor. As an undergraduate, she completed an internship with the Microsoft Speech Product Group. She has won several awards at the department, college, and university level for her work as a teaching assistant in the introductory computer science classes. She enjoys working with K12 students in numerous capacities, including teacher, mentor, and judge. She has been recognized for her outreach and involvement with women in computing as an Anita Borg finalist. Her hobbies include traveling, running, cooking, gardening, and learning to play the organ. Host: Ryan S.J.d. Baker, Department of Social Science & Policy Studies Refreshments will be served. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu Last modified:August 6, 2009

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