Proceedings of the “IV Workshop of the AI*IA Working Group on “Artificial Intelligence & E-Learning”

The IV Workshop of the Working Group of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) on “Artificial Intelligence & E-Learning” follows the previous workshops held in January 2003 in Rome (National Research Council), in September 2003 in Pisa (Didactical Center “L. Fibonacci” of the University of Pisa), in September 2004 in Perugia (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Perugia). This edition of the workshop is in conjunction with the eleventh international scientific Conferences on Advances in Artificial Intelligence, held bi-annually by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). Goal of this Workshop is to keep the picture on Artificial Intelligence and E-Learning updated with reference to theoretical issues as well as to experience of national research center and organization in this field, and to discuss the role of the technology and standards, with a special reference to semantic web and agents based environment. The papers selected for the workshop presentation cover theoretical aspects as well as applications, of the specific field as reported in the following. Giovanni De Gasperis, in his "Building an AIML Chatter Bot Knowledge-Base Starting from a FAQ and a Glossary”, discusses about “Chatter bots”, software programs that emulate human conversation and that can show human-like conversational behavior in limited knowledge dominion. Nicola Capuano, Sergio Miranda and Francesco Orciuoli, in their “IWT: A Semantic Web-based Educational System”, present an innovative e-learning solution named Intelligent Web Teacher, able to model educational domains knowledge, users’ competences and preferences in order to create personalized and contextualized learning activities and to allow users to communicate, to cooperate, to dynamically create new content to deliver and information to share as well as enabling platform for e-learning 2.0. Antonina Dattolo, Felice Ferrara, and Carlo Tasso, in their "Neighbor Selection and Recommendations in Social Bookmarking Tools”, propose a methodology for partitioning users, tags and resources into domains of interest; filtering tags and resources in accordance to the specific domains, it is then possible to select a different set of neighbors for each domain, improving the accuracy of recommendations. Ilaria Torre, in her "Social Tagging in eLearning. Recommendations from Virtual Fellow-Students”, deals with the issue of exploiting social tagging in the eLearning domain, discussing also an ongoing project for a tag-based personalization of knowledge. Serena Alvino, Stefania Bocconi, Pavel Boytchev, Jeffrey Earp and Luigi Sarti, in their “Capturing the semantic foundations of an application domain: an ontology-based approach”, describe the rational for an ontology-driven approach adopted in the domain of teacher education (TE) and used to describe and share TE- related digital resources across Europe. Giovanni Adorni, Diego Brondo, Mauro Coccoli, and Giuliano Vivanet, in their “Issues on Intelligent Web-Based Education: Structuring the Subject Matter”, present a knowledge based model for the design and development of units of learning and teaching aids, where it is possible to create lessons or entire courses starting from an ontological structure characterized by the integration of hierarchical and associative relationships between the educational objectives. Paolo Maresca, Giovanni Pascuzzi and Lidia Stanganelli, in their “Ecli-Law: A simulated environment for problem solving in the field of law”, discuss some concepts useful to solve problems of legal nature, presenting also a simulation environment for the resolution of legal problems by means of the ECLIPSE open source environment. Pier Giuseppe Rossi, Simone Carletti, Diego Bonura and Carlo Alberto Bentivoglio, in their “A multi-agent environment for tracking and monitoring learning activity”, focus on enhancing already-available open source LMS by implementing a general- purpose tracking and monitoring toolkit able to support e-Tutors in recognizing and dealing with pedagogical patterns stored into a decentralized knowledge Base. Antonella Carbonaro, in her “WordNet-based Summarization to Enhance Learning Interaction Tutoring”, discusses some issues on distributed knowledge sharing and communication and, more generally, on the scenario of social communication networks and knowledge representation, in which new perspectives on learning and teaching processes must be developed and supported, relating learning models, content-based tools, social organization and knowledge sharing. Roberto Pirrone, Vincenzo Cannella, Arianna Pipitone, and Giuseppe Russo, in their “Acquisition of New Knowledge to Manage Conversation in TutorJ”, present new modules developed for TutorJ (an Intelligent Tutoring System able to interact with users to assess their skills, and improve their knowledge in a specific domain to support the use of meta-cognitive strategies in the learners) to plan the conversation and to acquire new knowledge from semi-structured data sources. Serena Battigelli, Lidia Stanganelli and Angela Maria Sugliano, in their “A Prolog based tool in support to the instructional design process”, describe both a model for the instructional design of individualized educational programs, and the first step needed for the development of a tool, by means of Prolog Language, aimed to support teachers in the instructional design process.