Agent-based Intelligent Tutoring System for Arabic Grammar

Abstract

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) gives tailored teaching to students based on their learning preferences and/or skills to address the problems of learning. These include the difficulty of providing quality learning to students in remote areas, which may be hard to reach by students and/or teachers. Additionally, tracking the progress of each individual student and providing suitable learning material and exercises is not an easy task. One of the best candidates for such systems is Arabic grammar, which is a quite complex subject. Nevertheless, due to this complexity it hasn’t been adequately handled by researchers. Also, those systems have generally been developed for elementary-level grammar courses. Thus, this paper aims to develop an intelligent tutoring system to address problems of learning Arabic grammar and make education reachable anywhere based on self-paced learning. The system is developed for an Arabic grammar course at the University of Jeddah. An intelligent agent is a pack of software tools to be merged with various applications and databases to facilitate their operation by making them modular. They also facilitate modification and extension of any ITS without having to rebuild it from scratch. Though agents have been integrated in Arabic grammar tutoring systems, to the best of our knowledge, no framework or methodology has been proposed for developing such agent-based grammar ITSs. We attempt to address this problem in this paper.