Abstract
Web forums play a key role in the process of knowledge creation, providing means for users to exchange ideas and to collaborate. However, educational forums, along several others online educational environments, often suffer from topic disruption. Since the contents are mainly produced by participants (in our case learners), one or few individuals might change the course of the discussions. Thus, realigning the discussed topics of a forum thread is a task often conducted by a tutor or moderator. In order to support learners and tutors to harmonically align forum discussions that are pertinent to a given lecture or course, in this paper, we present a method that combines semantic technologies and a statistical method to find and expose relevant topics to be discussed in online discussion forums. We surveyed the outcomes of our topic extraction and selection method with students, professors and university staff members. Results suggest the potential usability of the method and the potential applicability in real learning scenarios.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Auer, S., Bizer, C., Kobilarov, G., Lehmann, J., Cyganiak, R., Ives, Z.: Dbpedia: A nucleus for a web of open data. In: Aberer, K., Choi, K.-S., Noy, N., Allemang, D., Lee, K.-I., Nixon, L.J.B., Golbeck, J., Mika, P., Maynard, D., Mizoguchi, R., Schreiber, G., Cudré-Mauroux, P. (eds.) ASWC 2007 and ISWC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4825, pp. 722–735. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I.: Latent dirichlet allocation. In: Dietterich, T.G., Becker, S., Ghahramani, Z. (eds.) NIPS, pp. 601–608. MIT Press (2001)
Cong, G., Wang, L., Lin, C.-Y., Song, Y.-I., Sun, Y.: Finding question-answer pairs from online forums. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2008, pp. 467–474. ACM, New York (2008)
Cottam, J.A., Menzel, S., Greenblatt, J.: Tutoring for retention. In: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2011, pp. 213–218. ACM, New York (2011)
Davis, F.D.: Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 319–340 (1989)
DeSanctis, G., Fayard, A.-L., Roach, M., Jiang, L.: Learning in online forums. European Management Journal 21(5), 565–577 (2003)
Fetahu, B., Dietze, S., Pereira Nunes, B., Antonio Casanova, M., Taibi, D., Nejdl, W.: A scalable approach for efficiently generating structured dataset topic profiles. In: Presutti, V., d’Amato, C., Gandon, F., d’Aquin, M., Staab, S., Tordai, A. (eds.) ESWC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8465, pp. 519–534. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Fetahu, B., Dietze, S., Pereira Nunes, B., Antonio Casanova, M., Taibi, D., Nejdl, W.: A scalable approach for efficiently generating structured dataset topic profiles. In: Presutti, V., d’Amato, C., Gandon, F., d’Aquin, M., Staab, S., Tordai, A. (eds.) ESWC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8465, pp. 519–534. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Fetahu, B., Dietze, S., Nunes, B.P., Taibi, D., Casanova, M.A.: Generating structured profiles of linked data graphs. In: Blomqvist, E., Groza, T. (eds.) International Semantic Web Conference. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1035, pp. 113–116. CEURWS. org (2013)
Hulpus, I., Hayes, C., Karnstedt, M., Greene, D.: Unsupervised graph-based topic labelling using dbpedia. In: Leonardi, S., Panconesi, A., Ferragina, P., Gionis, A. (eds.) WSDM, pp. 465–474. ACM (2013)
Li, N., Wu, D.D.: Using text mining and sentiment analysis for online forums hotspot detection and forecast. Decision Support Systems 48(2), 354–368 (2010)
Mazzolini, M., Maddison, S.: Sage, guide or ghost? the e ect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Computers Education 40(3), 237–253 (2003)
Nonaka, I.: A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science 5(1), 14–37 (1994)
Pereira Nunes, B., Mera, A., Casanova, M.A., Kawase, R.: Boosting retrieval of digital spoken content. In: Graña, M., Toro, C., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds.) KES 2012. LNCS, vol. 7828, pp. 153–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Pendergast, M.: An analysis tool for the assessment of student participation and implementation dynamics in online discussion forums. SIGITE Newsl. 3(2), 10–17 (2006)
Romero, C., López, M.-I., Luna, J.-M., Ventura, S.: Predicting students’ final performance from participation in on-line discussion forums. Comput. Educ. 68, 458–472 (2013)
Scaffidi, C., Dahotre, A., Zhang, Y.: How well do online forums facilitate discussion and collaboration among novice animation programmers? In: King, L.A.S., Musicant, D.R., Camp, T., Tymann, P.T. (eds.) SIGCSE, pp. 191–196. ACM (2012)
Shaul, M.: Assessing online discussion forum participation. IJICTE 3(3), 39–46 (2007)
Veerman, A.L., Andriessen, J.E.B., Kanselaar, G.: Collaborative learning through computer-mediated argumentation. In: Proceedings of the 1999 Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, CSCL 1999. International Society of the Learning Sciences (1999)
Vygotsky, L.: Mind in society. The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge; edited by cole, michael et al. edition, 0 1978 / 1930
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pereira Nunes, B., Kawase, R., Fetahu, B., Casanova, M.A., de Campos, G.H.B. (2014). Educational Forums at a Glance: Topic Extraction and Selection. In: Benatallah, B., Bestavros, A., Manolopoulos, Y., Vakali, A., Zhang, Y. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2014. WISE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8787. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11746-1_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11746-1_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11745-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11746-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)