Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced the successful evaluation of a novel semantic-based search tool to aid the authoring of intelligent tutoring systems for the US Army.
The Army continually creates new training materials as new weapons, equipment, and procedures are adopted and as training methods and technologies advance. Authors of intelligent tutoring systems can often adapt, refine, or extract information from existing training materials, but locating all the relevant existing materials is labor intensive. Charles River’s Content Retrieval and Extraction for Advanced Tutoring Environments, known as CREATE, addresses these issues by making it easier for authors of intelligent tutoring systems, including those working with the Army’s Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), to find the content they need.
“The cost of authoring intelligent tutoring systems is a significant barrier to their widespread deployment within the US Army. CREATE is designed to reduce this cost,” said Dr. Terry Patten, the Principal Investigator on the project at Charles River.
Charles River’s teammate on the effort, ICF, performed a double-blind evaluation of CREATE. Instructional systems designers searched for relevant content for seven learning objectives related to an Army battlefield radio either with CREATE or a traditional keyword search technology. Those who used the CREATE prototype search technology found five times as many relevant segments as the control group within a fixed time period and provided favorable feedback in a subjective survey.
“We were very pleased with the results from the assessment,” added Dr. Patten. “This evaluation clearly demonstrates the potential of CREATE technology to reduce the cost of authoring intelligent tutoring systems and we will use the subjective feedback to further refine the technology.”
Visit the CREATE page to learn more.
Charles River will be presenting CREATE’s capabilities at the I/ITSEC conference, which takes place from November 28th through December 3rd. Stop by Booth # 1159 or contact us.
