64,282 research outputs found
Comparative analysis of knowledge representation and reasoning requirements across a range of life sciences textbooks.
BackgroundUsing knowledge representation for biomedical projects is now commonplace. In previous work, we represented the knowledge found in a college-level biology textbook in a fashion useful for answering questions. We showed that embedding the knowledge representation and question-answering abilities in an electronic textbook helped to engage student interest and improve learning. A natural question that arises from this success, and this paper's primary focus, is whether a similar approach is applicable across a range of life science textbooks. To answer that question, we considered four different textbooks, ranging from a below-introductory college biology text to an advanced, graduate-level neuroscience textbook. For these textbooks, we investigated the following questions: (1) To what extent is knowledge shared between the different textbooks? (2) To what extent can the same upper ontology be used to represent the knowledge found in different textbooks? (3) To what extent can the questions of interest for a range of textbooks be answered by using the same reasoning mechanisms?ResultsOur existing modeling and reasoning methods apply especially well both to a textbook that is comparable in level to the text studied in our previous work (i.e., an introductory-level text) and to a textbook at a lower level, suggesting potential for a high degree of portability. Even for the overlapping knowledge found across the textbooks, the level of detail covered in each textbook was different, which requires that the representations must be customized for each textbook. We also found that for advanced textbooks, representing models and scientific reasoning processes was particularly important.ConclusionsWith some additional work, our representation methodology would be applicable to a range of textbooks. The requirements for knowledge representation are common across textbooks, suggesting that a shared semantic infrastructure for the life sciences is feasible. Because our representation overlaps heavily with those already being used for biomedical ontologies, this work suggests a natural pathway to include such representations as part of the life sciences curriculum at different grade levels
Eliciting New Wikipedia Users' Interests via Automatically Mined Questionnaires: For a Warm Welcome, Not a Cold Start
Every day, thousands of users sign up as new Wikipedia contributors. Once
joined, these users have to decide which articles to contribute to, which users
to seek out and learn from or collaborate with, etc. Any such task is a hard
and potentially frustrating one given the sheer size of Wikipedia. Supporting
newcomers in their first steps by recommending articles they would enjoy
editing or editors they would enjoy collaborating with is thus a promising
route toward converting them into long-term contributors. Standard recommender
systems, however, rely on users' histories of previous interactions with the
platform. As such, these systems cannot make high-quality recommendations to
newcomers without any previous interactions -- the so-called cold-start
problem. The present paper addresses the cold-start problem on Wikipedia by
developing a method for automatically building short questionnaires that, when
completed by a newly registered Wikipedia user, can be used for a variety of
purposes, including article recommendations that can help new editors get
started. Our questionnaires are constructed based on the text of Wikipedia
articles as well as the history of contributions by the already onboarded
Wikipedia editors. We assess the quality of our questionnaire-based
recommendations in an offline evaluation using historical data, as well as an
online evaluation with hundreds of real Wikipedia newcomers, concluding that
our method provides cohesive, human-readable questions that perform well
against several baselines. By addressing the cold-start problem, this work can
help with the sustainable growth and maintenance of Wikipedia's diverse editor
community.Comment: Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM-2019
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