Articles
Inquire Biology:
A Textbook that Answers Questions
Vinay K. Chaudhri, Britte Haugan Cheng, Adam Overholtzer,
Jeremy Roschelle, Aaron Spaulding, Peter Clark,
Mark Greaves, Dave Gunning
L
n Inquire Biology is a prototype of a earning a scientific discipline such as biology is a daunt-
new kind of intelligent textbook — one ing challenge. In a typical advanced high school or
that answers students’ questions, introductory college biology course, a student is expect-
engages their interest, and improves ed to learn about 5000 concepts and several hundred thou-
their understanding. Inquire Biology sand new relationships among them.1 Science textbooks are
provides unique capabilities through a
difficult to read and yet there are few alternative resources for
knowledge representation that captures
conceptual knowledge from the textbook study. Despite the great need for science graduates, too few
and uses inference procedures to answer students are willing to study science and many drop out
students’ questions. Students ask ques- without completing their degrees. New approaches are need-
tions by typing free-form natural lan- ed to provide students with a more usable and useful resource
guage queries or by selecting passages of and to accelerate their learning.
text. The system then attempts to The goal of the Inquire Biology textbook is to provide better
answer the question and also generates learning experiences to students, especially those students
suggested questions related to the query
who hesitate to ask questions.2 We wish to create an engag-
or selection. The questions supported by
ing learning experience for students so that more students
the system were chosen to be education-
ally useful, for example: what is the can succeed — and specifically to engage students in more
structure of X? compare X and Y? how actively processing the large number of concepts and rela-
does X relate to Y? In user studies, stu- tionships. Inquire Biology aims to achieve this by interactive
dents found this question-answering features focused on the relationships among concepts,
capability to be extremely useful while because the process of making sense of scientific concepts is
reading and while doing problem solv- strongly related to the process of understanding relationships
ing. In an initial controlled experiment, among concepts (National Research Council 1999). To
community college students using the
encourage students’ engagement in active reading, our peda-
Inquire Biology prototype outperformed
students using either a hard copy or con-
gogical approach is to help a student to articulate questions
ventional ebook version of the same about relationships among concepts and to support them in
biology textbook. While additional finding the answers.
research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology incorporates multiple technologies from the
Inquire Biology, the initial prototype field of artificial intelligence. It includes a formal knowledge
clearly demonstrates the promise of representation of the content of the textbook, reasoning
applying knowledge representation and methods for answering questions, natural language process-
question-answering technology to elec- ing to understand a user’s questions, and natural language
tronic textbooks.
generation to produce answers. It is based on a systematic
knowledge-acquisition process that educators can use to rep-
resent the textbook’s knowledge in a way that the computer
can reason with to answer and suggest questions. A unique
Copyright © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602 FALL 2013 55
,Articles
aspect of our approach is the use of human-comput- The Campbell Biology textbook contains the origi-
er interaction design methods to create a product nal content of the textbook as published by Pearson
that combines these advanced AI technologies into a Education. The textbook content is hyperlinked to
user experience that is compelling for students. the concept summary pages. These pages summarize
Inquire Biology is one of the products of Project Halo,3 salient facts and relationships that a student needs to
a long-term research effort to develop a capability to know about a concept. Summary pages combine con-
answer questions on a wide variety of science topics. tent from the glossary entries from the back of the
Inquire Biology is based on Campbell Biology (Reece book with automatically generated descriptions of
et al. 2011), which is a widely used textbook in salient properties and relationships for each of the
advanced high school and introductory college 5000 plus concepts in our knowledge base. These
courses. Campbell Biology is published by Pearson pages also include links to related concepts, relevant
Education, and we are using it under a research-use passages from the book, and follow-up questions use-
license. Using a popular textbook as the basis for our ful for further exploration.
research ensures that the content is pedagogically A student can ask questions of Inquire Biology in
sound and the results have immediate applicability three ways. First, a question may be typed into a free-
to a large group of students already using the text- form dialogue box, from which Inquire Biology com-
book. The basic concepts in the design of Inquire Biol- putes the closest questions that it can answer and
ogy are, however, broadly applicable to other text- gives the user a choice for selecting the best match
books and scientific disciplines. among them. Second, in response to the student
Exploration of the application of AI technology to highlighting in the text, Inquire Biology computes the
an electronic textbook comes at an opportune time most relevant questions it can answer for the selec-
when we are witnessing a large-scale transition from tion. Finally, Inquire Biology suggests questions for fur-
paper to electronic textbooks. Textbooks made avail- ther exploration on the concept summary pages and
able in electronic medium offer tremendous oppor- with each page that contains an answer. We next
tunities to leverage a variety of AI techniques much illustrate how students interact with these features of
broader than what we have considered in our work so Inquire Biology.
far. Textbooks made available in electronic medium
offer tremendous opportunities to leverage a variety Textbook
of AI techniques much broader than what we have Figure 1 shows the textbook interface of Inquire Biol-
considered in our work so far, for example, recom- ogy. Like most electronic textbooks, Inquire Biology
mending books (Pera and Ng 2012) and enhancing supports highlighting the text, taking notes in the
electronic textbooks with content from online margin, and interacting with graphics. Inquire Biolo-
resources such as images and videos (Agrawal et. al. gy leverages its knowledge base to expand on these
2011). Our focus on the use of knowledge represen- standard features in the following three ways: (1) The
tation leverages the synergy between the need for toolbar provides a table of contents, index to concept
precise knowledge content in an electronic textbook summaries, and navigation history. Students can ask
and the strength of knowledge representation and a question at any time by tapping the Q icon. (2)
reasoning to facilitate that. Within the text, biology terms are automatically
We begin this article with a description of Inquire linked — students can tap to see a quick pop-up defi-
Biology, introducing its key features and describing nition or to navigate to the full concept summary. (3)
how a student might use Inquire Biology for active Students can highlight with a quick and easy gesture,
reading and homework. We give an overview of the and each highlight serves as the anchor for a note
AI technology used in Inquire Biology and then pres- card and a list of related questions, encouraging stu-
ent the results of a day-long pilot experiment show- dents to dig deeper into the material.
ing that the students studying from Inquire Biology
received approximately 10 percent higher grades on Concept Summary Page
homework and posttest problems as compared to stu- For every biology term in the book, Inquire Biology
dents studying from the paper or electronic version presents a detailed concept summary page. Each of
of the textbook. We discuss the generalizability and these pages begins with a human-authored definition
scalability of the approach and conclude the paper of a concept (marked as 1 in figure 2). Most of these
with a discussion on related work and directions for definitions are already available at the back of Camp-
future work. bell Biology, but some were added as part of the
knowledge base (KB). The text definition is followed
by key facts and relationships about that concept
Features of Inquire Biology (marked as 2 in figure 2). These are automatically
Inquire Biology connects three kinds of information to generated from the KB. Since the KB is specific to
meet student needs: the Inquire Biology textbook, con- Campbell Biology, the concept summary never has the
cept summary pages, and computer-generated sort of unnecessary details students might find on
answers to questions. Wikipedia or other general-purpose sites.
56 AI MAGAZINE
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2
Figure 1. Textbook Interface.
The textbook content is from page 132 of Biology (9th edition) by Neil A. Campbell and Jane B. Reece; Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Edu-
cation, Inc. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc.
The sidebar of a concept summary page contains help illustrate the types of questions Inquire Biology
the figures from the textbook that are most relevant can answer.
to that topic (marked as 3 on figure 2). Finally, ques- The question-asking interface, shown in figure 3,
tions relevant for further exploration of the topic are is invoked by tapping the Q icon. The student can
listed (marked as 4 in figure 2). Knowledge in a con- either enter a free-form question directly, or enter a
cept summary page can span multiple chapters, but list of biology terms. Inquire Biology will suggest ques-
the concept summaries put all the relevant facts and tions related to free-form questions as the student
figures in one place. Unlike most glossaries, the types, helping students formulate their questions and
Inquire Biology concept summary is not a dead end offering alternatives for cases where Inquire Biology
but can act as a catalyst to further learning — pop-up cannot understand the free-form question directly.
definitions and follow-up questions help students These suggested questions are in three main cate-
explore relationships between concepts and dig deep- gories: definitions and reference information, com-
er into the material. parisons between two concepts, and questions that
explore relationships, such as how structure affects
Asking Questions function. These three types provide the best overlap
Students can ask questions at any time, but they may between the system’s capabilities and the types of
not always know what to ask. Inquire Biology is proac- questions students find useful.
tive, suggesting questions in a variety of contexts to In response to each question, Inquire Biology returns
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