Graduated in 2010, with a PhD in computer science (focus on logic and NLP). Working with ontologies since then. Aims and Objectives of the Research Inquire [1] is a new electronic textbook that integrates the Campbell biology textbook [2] with a reasoning system and a rich biology knowledge base (KB), allowing it to answer a variety of questions. It offers new ways for students to explore and interact with educational materials, and ultimately, improve their understanding of biology. The KB and question answering system are crucial to many of Inquire's interactive features. Subject matter experts (SMEs), who are biology teachers, encode knowledge in the KB, using the process described in [3]. A focus of our research is to provide the SMEs with modelling guidelines or patterns, so that we may systematically acquire knowledge from the textbook. In the following section, we narrow our focus to a particularly challenging class of problems -- modelling the core themes in the textbook.
4. How do we retrieve and present answers given the information in the KB? We adopted the following steps to handle the core theme relating structure to function: 1. Requirements Specification – SMEs define the core theme in biology terms. We then conduct a user study, where the definition of the core theme is discussed with teachers and students. During the study, we gather questions about the core theme. 2. Design – The questions are categorized into a set of templates. We then develop modelling vocabulary and guidelines, targeted at answering these questions. 3. Implementation -- The SMEs adopt the modelling guidelines during encoding.
Algorithms to retrieve and present answers are developed. Based on the algorithms, we can classify the questions into four types – (a) descriptions (b) similarities and differences, (c) path-based relationships, and (d) slot-value queries. 4. Evaluation – Users (students and teachers) assess the quality of answers.
Research Results to Date We have designed and implemented a representation for the core theme relating structure to function. An evaluation is planned in the near future. Here, we briefly describe the main relations that used for this core theme: 1. Structure is described using a set of meronymic relations (e.g., has-part, has-region), spatial relations (e.g., is-inside, is-outside), and properties (e.g., area, diameter).
These relations are provided by the component library [
The SMEs are given guidelines to identify the relations based on sentences in the textbook. To answer questions, we need to account for various subtleties in terms of the transitivity of parts and in transferring functions from substructures to superstructures. Due to space restrictions, we omit a discussion of these issues.