Assisting Undergraduate Students in Writing Spanish Methodology Sections

Samuel González-López, Steven Bethard, Aurelio Lopez-Lopez


Abstract
In undergraduate theses, a good methodology section should describe the series of steps that were followed in performing the research. To assist students in this task, we develop machine-learning models and an app that uses them to provide feedback while students write. We construct an annotated corpus that identifies sentences representing methodological steps and labels when a methodology contains a logical sequence of such steps. We train machine-learning models based on language modeling and lexical features that can identify sentences representing methodological steps with 0.939 f-measure, and identify methodology sections containing a logical sequence of steps with an accuracy of 87%. We incorporate these models into a Microsoft Office Add-in, and show that students who improved their methodologies according to the model feedback received better grades on their methodologies.
Anthology ID:
2020.bea-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Seattle, WA, USA → Online
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–123
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.bea-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.bea-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samuel González-López, Steven Bethard, and Aurelio Lopez-Lopez. 2020. Assisting Undergraduate Students in Writing Spanish Methodology Sections. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 115–123, Seattle, WA, USA → Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assisting Undergraduate Students in Writing Spanish Methodology Sections (González-López et al., BEA 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/2020.bea-1.11.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929853