Title: Automatic extraction of prerequisites and learning outcome from learning material

Authors: Sonal Jain; Jyoti Pareek

Addresses: Institute of Engineering and Technology, JK Lakshmipat Univeristy, Laliya ka Vas, Mahapura, Jaipur 302026, India ' School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad 380006, India

Abstract: To provide an adaptive guidance to the student through learning object repositories, a system needs to have knowledge about the learner as well as material. This paper discusses identification of metadata that describes the pedagogical aspects of a document. Learning goals and prerequisites, if stored as part of metadata, can be utilised for intelligent recommendations. Manual annotation is a time consuming and expensive process. Correct instantiation of learning object metadata requires combined educational and technical skills. This paper proposes natural language processing-based automatic concept extraction and outlines rule-based approach for separation of prerequisite concepts and learning outcomes covered in learning document. The importance of automatic extraction of prerequisite terms is strengthened after evaluation of this work, since results show that concepts missed by authors are suggested by the system. To increase precision of retrieval, subject domain ontology is used.

Keywords: information retrieval; linguistic processing; metadata; personalised e-learning; electronic learning; online learning; learning prerequisites; learning outcomes; learning materials; object repositories; learning objects; pedagogical aspects; natural language processing; NLP; subject domain ontology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2013.056601

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2013 Vol.8 No.2, pp.145 - 154

Received: 19 Jul 2012
Accepted: 16 Apr 2013
Published online: 14 Oct 2014 *

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