Danielle McNamara

Department of Psychology
University of Memphis

http://csep.psyc.memphis.edu/mcnamara/

Friday, October 23

12:00-1:30 pm

Working Toward a Writing Pal

This talk will describe my newest line of research, which is geared

toward the development of an intelligent tutoring system to provide

writing strategy training (The Writing Pal). This research builds off

of two research projects: Coh-Metrix (an automated tool that measures

linguistic features of text) and iSTART (a reading strategy ITS).

Coh-Metrix provides the ability to assess a multitude of linguistic

features in text. iSTART provides a framework for teaching strategies.

The Writing Pal follows a similar approach as iSTART in providing

strategy training by using pedagogical agents who interact with each

other and with the student to introduce the strategies, after which the

student practices using the strategies. Computational linguistic

algorithms are used to provide feedback to the student during training.

This talk will describe the Writing Pal system as well as recent

research conducted in order to develop the computational algorithms.

This research has involved collecting corpora of essays to examine

linguistic differences between good and poor essays as well as

experiments examining the effects of modifying these linguistic

differences.