A Multi-criteria Decision Support System for Ph.D. Supervisor Selection: A Hybrid Approach

Selection of a suitable Ph.D. supervisor is a very important step in a student’s career. This paper presents a multi-criteria decision support system to assist students in making this choice. The system employs a hybrid method that first utilizes a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to extract the relative importance of the identified criteria and sub-criteria to consider when selecting a supervisor. Then, it applies an information retrieval-based similarity algorithm (TF/IDF or Okapi BM25) to retrieve relevant candidate supervisor profiles based on the student’s research interest. The selected profiles are then re-ranked based on other relevant factors chosen by the user, such as publication record, research grant record, and collaboration record. The ranking method evaluates the potential supervisors objectively based on various metrics that are defined in terms of detailed domain-specific knowledge, making part of the decision making automatic. In contrast with other existing works, this system does not require the professor’s involvement and no subjective measures are employed

A Framework for Personalized Content Recommendations to Support Informal Learning in Massively Diverse Information WIKIS

Personalization has proved to achieve better learning outcomes by adapting to specific learners’ needs, interests, and/or preferences. Traditionally, most personalized learning software systems focused on formal learning. However, learning personalization is not only desirable for formal learning, it is also required for informal learning, which is self-directed, does not follow a specified curriculum, and does not lead to formal qualifications. Wikis among other informal learning platforms are found to attract an increasing attention for informal learning, especially Wikipedia. The nature of wikis enables learners to freely navigate the learning environment and independently construct knowledge without being forced to follow a predefined learning path in accordance with the constructivist learning theory. Nevertheless, navigation on information wikis suffer from several limitations. To support informal learning on Wikipedia and similar environments, it is important to provide easy and fast access to relevant content. Recommendation systems (RSs) have long been used to effectively provide useful recommendations in different technology enhanced learning (TEL) contexts. However, the massive diversity of unstructured content as well as user base on such information oriented websites poses major challenges when designing recommendation models for similar environments. In addition to these challenges, evaluation of TEL recommender systems for informal learning is rather a challenging activity due to the inherent difficulty in measuring the impact of recommendations on informal learning with the absence of formal assessment and commonly used learning analytics. In this research, a personalized content recommendation framework (PCRF) for information wikis as well as an evaluation framework that can be used to evaluate the impact of personalized content recommendations on informal learning from wikis are proposed. The presented recommendation framework models learners’ interests by continuously extrapolating topical navigation graphs from learners’ free navigation and applying graph structural analysis algorithms to extract interesting topics for individual users. Then, it integrates learners’ interest models with fuzzy thesauri for personalized content recommendations. Our evaluation approach encompasses two main activities. First, the impact of personalized recommendations on informal learning is evaluated by assessing conceptual knowledge in users’ feedback. Second, web analytics data is analyzed to get an insight into users’ progress and focus throughout the test session. Our evaluation revealed that PCRF generates highly relevant recommendations that are adaptive to changes in user’s interest using the HARD model with rank-based mean average precision (MAP@k) scores ranging between 100% and 86.4%. In addition, evaluation of informal learning revealed that users who used Wikipedia with personalized support could achieve higher scores on conceptual knowledge assessment with average score of 14.9 compared to 10.0 for the students who used the encyclopedia without any recommendations. The analysis of web analytics data show that users who used Wikipedia with personalized recommendations visited larger number of relevant pages compared to the control group, 644 vs 226 respectively. In addition, they were also able to make use of a larger number of concepts and were able to make comparisons and state relations between concepts

The Architecture and Datasets of Docear's Research Paper Recommender System

In the past few years, we have developed a research paper recommender system for our reference management software Docear. In this paper, we introduce the architecture of the recommender system and four datasets. The architecture comprises of multiple components, e.g. for crawling PDFs, generating user models, and calculating content-based recommendations. It supports researchers and developers in building their own research paper recommender systems, and is, to the best of our knowledge, the most comprehensive architecture that has been released in this field. The four datasets contain metadata of 9.4 million academic articles, including 1.8 million articles publicly available on the Web; the articles' citation network; anonymized information on 8,059 Docear users; information about the users' 52,202 mind-maps and personal libraries; and details on the 308,146 recommendations that the recommender system delivered. The datasets are a unique source of information to enable, for instance, research on collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and the use of reference-management and mind-mapping software