Concept Map Mining: A Definition and a Framework for Its Evaluation

Concept maps are visual representations of knowledge, widely used in educational contexts. We use the term "concept map mining" (CMM) to refer to the automatic extraction of concept maps from documents such as essays. The principles behind CMM have been proposed for applications such as: information extraction in specific knowledge domains, the measurement of student understanding and misconceptions based on written essays, and as a preliminary step to creating domain ontologies.Previous work on the automatic extraction of concept maps present two problems: 1) overly simplistic and varying definitions of concept maps, and 2) the lack of an evaluation framework that can be used to measure the quality of the generated maps. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of the term CMM, with a focus on educational applications.We also propose an evaluation framework that will allow other researchers to share a common ground to evaluate the performance of CMM methods.