A Granularity-Based Intelligent Tutoring System for Zooarchaeology

Identifier:  imarina:6013602

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/imarina6013602

Authors:  Sacha, Gomez-Monivas; Fort, Santiago; Hernandez, Cristo; Perez, Leopoldo; Subirats, Laia

Abstract:
Featured Application This study creates an intelligent tutoring system in archaeology for helping students in specialized tasks that require analysis of huge amounts of data. The method proposed here implies the application of classification algorithms that must be trained with a complete data set in order to give accurate results. We have tested our method by developing an intelligent tutoring system in the field of zooarchaeology. Abstract This paper presents a tutoring system which uses three different granularities for helping students to classify animals from bone fragments in zooarchaeology. The 3406 bone remains, which have 64 attributes, were obtained from the excavation of the Middle Palaeolithic site of El Salt (Alicante, Spain). The coarse granularity performs a five-class prediction, the medium a twelve-class prediction, and the fine a fifteen-class prediction. In the coarse granularity, the results show that the first 10 most relevant attributes for classification are width, bone, thickness, length, bone fragment, anatomical group, long bone circumference, X, Y, and Z. Based on those results, a user-friendly interface of the tutor has been built in order to train archaeology students to classify new remains using the coarse granularity. A pilot has been performed in the 2019 excavation season in Abric del Pastor (Alicante, Spain), where the automatic tutoring system was used by students to classify 51 new remains. The pilot experience demonstrated the usefulness of the tutoring system both for students when facing their first classification activities and also for seniors since the tutoring system gives them valuable clues for helping in difficult classification problems.