Characterizing the content of a technical document in terms of its learning
utility can be useful for applications related to education, such as generating
reading lists from large collections of documents. We refer to this learning
utility as the "pedagogical value" of the document to the learner. While
pedagogical value is an important concept that has been studied extensively
within the education domain, there has been little work exploring it from a
computational, i.e., natural language processing (NLP), perspective. To allow a
computational exploration of this concept, we introduce the notion of
"pedagogical roles" of documents (e.g., Tutorial and Survey) as an intermediary
component for the study of pedagogical value. Given the lack of available
corpora for our exploration, we create the first annotated corpus of
pedagogical roles and use it to test baseline techniques for automatic
prediction of such roles.Comment: 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational
Applications (BEA) at EMNLP 2017; 12 page