A Topic Extraction Process for Online Forums

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ICALT2014 (picture taken by Mikhail Fominykh)

Forums play a key role in the process of knowledge creation, providing means for users to exchange ideas and to collaborate. However, educational forums, along several others online educational environments, often suffer from topic disruption. Since the contents are mainly produced by participants (in our case learners), one or a few individuals might change the course of the discussions. Thus, realigning the discussed topics of a forum thread is a task often conducted by a tutor or moderator. In order to support learners and tutors to harmonically align forum discussions that are pertinent to a given lecture or course, in this paper, we present a method that combines semantic technologies and a statistical method to find and expose relevant topics to be discussed in online discussion forums.

Authors: Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Alexander Arturo Mera Caraballo, Ricardo Kawase, Besnik Fetahu, Marco Antonio Casanova and Gilda Helena Bernardino De Campos

PDF: nunes-icalt2014

Automatic Competence Leveling of Learning Objects

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ICALT2013

A competence is the effective performance in a domain at different levels of proficiency. Educational institutions apply competences to understand whether a person has a particular level of ability or skill. Educational resource enriched with competence information allows learners identifying, on a fine-grained level, which resources to study with the aim to reach a specific competence target. However, the process of annotating learning objects with competence levels is a very time consuming task, ideally, this task should be performed by experts on the subjects of the educational resources. Due to this, most educational resources available online do not enclose competence information. In this paper, we present a method to tackle the problem of automatically assigning an educational resource with competence levels. To solve these problems, we exploit information extracted from external repositories available on the Web, which lead us to a domain independent approach. We demonstrate the quality of the proposed methods through an evaluation on real world data with an additional user study. Results show that the automatic competence level assignment achieves 84% precision on ground truth data. The key implications of our approach are: first, it effectively facilitates experts in the arduous task of competence assignment and second, it directly supports learners to retrieve proper leveled material.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, Bernardo Pereira Nunes and Marco Fisichella

PDF: kawase-icalt2013a

As Simple as It Gets – A Sentence Simplifier for Different Learning Levels and Contexts

This paper presents a text simplification method that transforms complex sentences into simplified forms. Our method uses NLP-techniques to simplify the text based on the target audience context, improving its overall understandability. We evaluate our approach in two aspects: grammatical structure and understandability. In both aspects, our approach achieved good results, showing its applicability to the learning process.

Authors: Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, Marco A. Casanova and Stefan Dietze

PDF: nunes-icalt2013

Content-Based Movie Recommendation within Learning Contexts

A good movie is like a good book. As a good book can serve entertaining and learning purposes, so does a movie. In addition to that, movies are in general more engaging and reach a wider audience. In this work, we present and evaluate a method that overcomes the challenge of generating recommendations among heterogeneous resources. In our case, we recommend movies in the context of a learning object. We evaluate our method with 60 participants that judged the relevance of the recommendations. Results show that, in over 74% of the cases the recommendations are in fact related to the given learning object, outperforming a text-based recommendation approach. The implications of our work can take learning outside the classroom and invoke it during the joy of watching a movie.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Patrick Siehndel

PDF: kawase-icalt2013b