A Transfer Learning Pipeline for Educational Resource Discovery with Application in Survey Generation
Irene Li, Thomas George, Alex Fabbri, Tammy Liao, Benjamin Chen, Rina Kawamura, Richard Zhou, Vanessa Yan, Swapnil Hingmire, Dragomir Radev
Abstract
Effective human learning depends on a wide selection of educational materials that align with the learner’s current understanding of the topic. While the Internet has revolutionized human learning or education, a substantial resource accessibility barrier still exists. Namely, the excess of online information can make it challenging to navigate and discover high-quality learning materials in a given subject area. In this paper, we propose an automatic pipeline for building an educational resource discovery system for new domains. The pipeline consists of three main steps: resource searching, feature extraction, and resource classification. We first collect frequent queries from a set of seed documents, and search the web with these queries to obtain candidate resources such as lecture slides and introductory blog posts. Then, we process these resources for BERT-based features and meta-features. Next, we train a tree-based classifier to decide whether they are suitable learning materials. The pipeline achieves F1 scores of 0.94 and 0.82 when evaluated on two similar but novel domains. Finally, we demonstrate how this pipeline can benefit two applications: prerequisite chain learning and leading paragraph generation for surveys. We also release a corpus of 39,728 manually labeled web resources and 659 queries from NLP, Computer Vision (CV), and Statistics (STATS).- Anthology ID:
- 2023.bea-1.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan, Torsten Zesch
- Venue:
- BEA
- SIG:
- SIGEDU
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 29–43
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.3
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.3
- Cite (ACL):
- Irene Li, Thomas George, Alex Fabbri, Tammy Liao, Benjamin Chen, Rina Kawamura, Richard Zhou, Vanessa Yan, Swapnil Hingmire, and Dragomir Radev. 2023. A Transfer Learning Pipeline for Educational Resource Discovery with Application in Survey Generation. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 29–43, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Transfer Learning Pipeline for Educational Resource Discovery with Application in Survey Generation (Li et al., BEA 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.bea-1.3.pdf