From Texts to Prerequisites. Identifying and Annotating Propaedeutic Relations in Educational Textual Resources

openPrerequisite Relations (PRs) are dependency relations established between two distinct concepts expressing which piece(s) of information a student has to learn first in order to understand a certain target concept. Such relations are one of the most fundamental in Education, playing a crucial role not only for what concerns new knowledge acquisition, but also in the novel applications of Artificial Intelligence to distant and e-learning. Indeed, resources annotated with such information could be used to develop automatic systems able to acquire and organize the knowledge embodied in educational resources, possibly fostering educational applications personalized, e.g., on students' needs and prior knowledge. The present thesis discusses the issues and challenges of identifying PRs in educational textual materials with the purpose of building a shared understanding of the relation among the research community. To this aim, we present a methodology for dealing with prerequisite relations as established in educational textual resources which aims at providing a systematic approach for uncovering PRs in textual materials, both when manually annotating and automatically extracting the PRs. The fundamental principles of our methodology guided the development of a novel framework for PR identification which comprises three components, each tackling a different task: (i) an annotation protocol (PREAP), reporting the set of guidelines and recommendations for building PR-annotated resources; (ii) an annotation tool (PRET), supporting the creation of manually annotated datasets reflecting the principles of PREAP; (iii) an automatic PR learning method based on machine learning (PREL). The main novelty of our methodology and framework lies in the fact that we propose to uncover PRs from textual resources relying solely on the content of the instructional material: differently from other works, rather than creating de-contextualised PRs, we acknowledge the presence of a PR between two concepts only if emerging from the way they are presented in the text. By doing so, we anchor relations to the text while modelling the knowledge structure entailed in the resource. As an original contribution of this work, we explore whether linguistic complexity of the text influences the task of manual identification of PRs. To this aim, we investigate the interplay between text and content in educational texts through a crowd-sourcing experiment on concept sequencing. Our methodology values the content of educational materials as it incorporates the evidence acquired from such investigation which suggests that PR recognition is highly influenced by the way in which concepts are introduced in the resource and by the complexity of the texts. The thesis reports a case study dealing with every component of the PR framework which produced a novel manually-labelled PR-annotated dataset.openXXXIII CICLO - DIGITAL HUMANITIES. TECNOLOGIE DIGITALI, ARTI, LINGUE, CULTURE E COMUNICAZIONE - Lingue, culture e tecnologie digitaliAlzetta, Chiar

Towards a quantitative evaluation of the relationship between the domain knowledge and the ability to assess peer work

In this work we present the preliminary results provided by the statistical modeling of the cognitive relationship between the knowledge about a topic a the ability to assess peer achievements on the same topic. Our starting point is Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain, and our outcomes confirm the hypothesized ranking. A further consideration that can be derived is that meta-cognitive abilities (e.g., assessment) require deeper domain knowledge

A framework for structuring prerequisite relations between concepts in educational textbooks

In our age we are experiencing an increasing availability of digital educational resources and self-regulated learning. In this scenario, the development of automatic strategies for organizing the knowledge embodied in educational resources has a tremendous potential for building personalized learning paths and applications such as intelligent textbooks and recommender systems of learning materials. To this aim, a straightforward approach consists in enriching the educational materials with a concept graph, i.a. a knowledge structure where key concepts of the subject matter are represented as nodes and prerequisite dependencies among such concepts are also explicitly represented. This thesis focuses therefore on prerequisite relations in textbooks and it has two main research goals. The first goal is to define a methodology for systematically annotating prerequisite relations in textbooks, which is functional for analysing the prerequisite phenomenon and for evaluating and training automatic methods of extraction. The second goal concerns the automatic extraction of prerequisite relations from textbooks. These two research goals will guide towards the design of PRET, i.e. a comprehensive framework for supporting researchers involved in this research issue. The framework described in the present thesis allows indeed researchers to conduct the following tasks: 1) manual annotation of educational texts, in order to create datasets to be used for machine learning algorithms or for evaluation as gold standards; 2) annotation analysis, for investigating inter-annotator agreement, graph metrics and in-context linguistic features; 3) data visualization, for visually exploring datasets and gaining insights of the problem that may lead to improve algorithms; 4) automatic extraction of prerequisite relations. As for the automatic extraction, we developed a method that is based on burst analysis of concepts in the textbook and we used the gold dataset with PR annotation for its evaluation, comparing the method with other metrics for PR extraction

linguistically driven strategy for concept prerequisites learning on italian

n/

A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

On Cognitive Preferences and the Plausibility of Rule-based Models

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.Comment: V4: Another rewrite of section on interpretability to clarify focus on plausibility and relation to interpretability, comprehensibility, and justifiabilit

Video Augmentation in Education: in-context support for learners through prerequisite graphs

The field of education is experiencing a massive digitisation process that has been ongoing for the past decade. The role played by distance learning and Video-Based Learning, which is even more reinforced by the pandemic crisis, has become an established reality. However, the typical features of video consumption, such as sequential viewing and viewing time proportional to duration, often lead to sub-optimal conditions for the use of video lessons in the process of acquisition, retrieval and consolidation of learning contents. Video augmentation can prove to be an effective support to learners, allowing a more flexible exploration of contents, a better understanding of concepts and relationships between concepts and an optimization of time required for video consumption at different stages of the learning process. This thesis focuses therefore on the study of methods for: 1) enhancing video capabilities through video augmentation features; 2) extracting concept and relationships from video materials; 3) developing intelligent user interfaces based on the knowledge extracted. The main research goal is to understand to what extent video augmentation can improve the learning experience. This research goal inspired the design of EDURELL Framework, within which two applications were developed to enable the testing of augmented methods and their provision. The novelty of this work lies in using the knowledge within the video, without exploiting external materials, to exploit its educational potential. The enhancement of the user interface takes place through various support features among which in particular a map that progressively highlights the prerequisite relationships between the concepts as they are explained, i.e., following the advancement of the video. The proposed approach has been designed following a user-centered iterative approach and the results in terms of effect and impact on video comprehension and learning experience make a contribution to the research in this field

LiDom builder: Automatising the construction of multilingual domain modules

136 p.Laburpena Lan honetan LiDOM Builder tresnaren analisi, diseinu eta ebaluazioa aurkezten dira. Teknologian oinarritutako hezkuntzarako tresnen Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunak testuliburu elektronikoetatik era automatikoan erauztea ahalbidetzen du LiDOM Builderek. Ezagutza eskuratzeko, Hizkuntzaren Prozesamendurako eta Ikaste Automatikorako teknikekin batera, hainbat baliabide eleaniztun erabiltzen ditu, besteak beste, Wikipedia eta WordNet.Domeinu Modulu Elebakarretik Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunerako bidean, LiDOM Builder tresna DOM-Sortze ingurunearen (Larrañaga, 2012; Larrañaga et al., 2014) bilakaera dela esan genezake. Horretarako, LiDOM Builderek domeinua ikuspegi eleaniztun batetik adieraztea ahalbidetzen duen mekanismoa dakar. Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunak bi maila ezberdinetako ezagutza jasotzen du: Ikaste Domeinuaren Ontologia (IDO), non hizkuntza ezberdinetan etiketatutako topikoak eta hauen arteko erlazio pedagogikoak jasotzen baitira, eta Ikaste Objektuak (IO), hau da, metadatuekin etiketatutako baliabide didaktikoen bilduma, hizkuntza horietan. LiDOM Builderek onartutako hizkuntza guztietan domeinuaren topikoak adierazteko aukera ematen du. Topiko bakoitza lotuta dago dagokion hizkuntzako bere etiketa baliokidearekin. Gainera, IOak deskribatzeko metadatu aberastuak erabiltzen ditu hizkuntza desberdinetan parekideak diren baliabide didaktikoak lotzeko.LiDOM Builderen, hasiera batean, domeinu-modulua hizkuntza jakin batean idatzitako dokumentu batetik erauziko da eta, baliabide eleaniztunak erabiliko dira, gerora, bai topikoak bai IOak beste hizkuntzetan ere lortzeko. Lan honetan, Ingelesez idatzitako liburuek osatuko dute informazio-iturri nagusia bai doitze-prozesuan bai ebaluazio-prozesuan. Zehazki, honako testuliburu hauek erabili dira: Principles of Object Oriented Programming (Wong and Nguyen, 2010), Introduction to Astronomy (Morison, 2008) eta Introduction to Molecular Biology (Raineri, 2010). Baliabide eleaniztunei dagokienez, Wikipedia, WordNet eta Wikipediatik erauzitako beste hainbat ezagutza-base erabili dira. Testuliburuetatik Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunak eraikitzeko, LiDOM Builder hiru modulu nagusitan oinarritzen da: LiTeWi eta LiReWi moduluak IDO eleaniztuna eraikitzeaz arduratuko dira eta LiLoWi, aldiz, IO eleaniztunak eraikitzeaz. Jarraian, aipatutako modulu bakoitza xehetasun gehiagorekin azaltzen da.¿ LiTeWi (Conde et al., 2015) moduluak, edozein ikaste-domeinutako testuliburu batetik abiatuta, Hezkuntzarako Ontologia bati dagozkion hainbat termino eleaniztun identifikatuko ditu, hala nola TF-IDF, KP-Miner, CValue eta Shallow Parsing Grammar. Hori lortzeko, gainbegiratu gabeko datu-erauzketa teknikez eta Wikipediaz baliatzen da. Ontologiako topikoak erauzteak LiTeWi-n hiru urrats ditu: lehenik hautagai diren terminoen erauzketa; bigarrenik, lortutako terminoen konbinatzea eta fintzea azken termino zerrenda osatuz; eta azkenik, zerrendako terminoak beste hizkuntzetara mapatzea Wikipedia baliatuz.¿ LiReWi (Conde et al., onartzeko) moduluak Hezkuntzarako Ontologia erlazio pedagogikoez aberastuko du, beti ere testuliburua abiapuntu gisa erabilita. Lau motatako erlazio pedagogikoak erauziko ditu (isA, partOf, prerequisite eta pedagogicallyClose) hainbat teknika eta ezagutza-base konbinatuz. Ezagutza-baseen artean Wikipedia, WordNet, WikiTaxonomy, WibiTaxonomy eta WikiRelations daude. LiReWi-k ere hiru urrats emango ditu erlazioak lortzeko: hasteko, ontologiako topikoak erlazioak erauzteko erabiliko diren ezagutza-base desberdinekin mapatuko ditu; gero, hainbat erlazio-erauzle, bakoitza teknika desberdin batean oinarritzen dena, exekutatuko ditu konkurrenteki erlazio hautagaiak erauzteko; eta, bukatzeko, lortutako emaitza guztiak konbinatu eta iragaziko ditu erlazio pedagogikoen azken multzoa lortuz. Gainera, DOM-Sortzetik LiDOM Buildererako trantsizioan, tesi honetan hobetu egin dira dokumentuen indizeetatik erauzitako isA eta partOf erlazioak, Wikipedia baliabide gehigarri bezala erabilita (Conde et al., 2014).¿ LiLoWi moduluak IOak -batzuk eleaniztunak- erauziko ditu, abiapuntuko testuliburutik ez ezik Wikipedia edo WordNet bezalako ezagutza-baseetatik ere. IDO ontologiako topiko bakoitza Wikipedia eta WordNet-ekin mapatu ostean, LiLoWi-k baliabide didaktikoak erauziko ditu hainbat IO erauzlez baliatuz.IO erauzketa-prozesuan, DOM-Sortzetik LiDOM Buildereko bidean, eta Wikipedia eta WordNet erabili aurretik, ingelesa hizkuntza ere gehitu eta ebaluatu da (Conde et al., 2012).LiDOM Builderen ebaluaziori dagokionez, modulu bakoitza bere aldetik testatua eta ebaluatua izan da bai Gold-standard teknika bai aditu-ebaluazioa baliatuz. Gainera, Wikipedia eta WordNet ezagutza-baseen integrazioak IOen erauzketari ekarri dion hobekuntza ere ebaluatu da. Esan genezake kasu guztietan lortu diren emaitzak oso onak direla.Bukatzeko, eta laburpen gisa, lau dira LiDOM Builderek Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunaren arloari egin dizkion ekarpen nagusiak:¿ Domeinu Modulu Eleaniztunak adierazteko mekanismo egokia.¿ LiTeWiren garapena. Testuliburuetatik Hezkuntzarako Ontologietarako terminologia eleaniztuna erauztea ahalbidetzen du modulu honek. Ingelesa eta Gaztelera hizkuntzentzako termino-erauzlea eskura dago https://github.com/Neuw84/LiTe URLan.¿ LiReWiren garapena. Testuliburuetatik Hezkuntzarako Ontologietarako erlazio pedagogikoak erauztea ahalbidetzen du modulu honek. Erabiltzen duen Wikipedia/WordNet mapatzailea eskura dago https://github.com/Neuw84/Wikipedia2WordNet URLan.¿ LiLoWiren garapena. Testuliburua eta Wikipedia eta WordNet ezagutza-baseak erabilita IO eleaniztunak erauztea ahalbidetzen du modulu honek

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform