A Topic Extraction Process for Online Forums

Author

Pereira Nunes, Bernardo ; Mera, Alexander ; Kawase, Ricardo ; Fetahu, Besnik ; Casanova, Marco A. ; de Campos, Gilda Helena B.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf., PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

fYear

2014

fDate

7-10 July 2014

Firstpage

541

Lastpage

543

Abstract

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 a 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.

Keywords

Internet; computer aided instruction; groupware; statistical analysis; collaboration; educational forums; ideas exchange; knowledge creation process; online discussion forums; online educational environments; semantic technologies; statistical method; topic disruption; topic extraction process; Discussion forums; Educational institutions; Informatics; Instruction sets; Message systems; Semantics; Discussion forum; Forum assessment; Topic coverage; Topic extraction; Topic recommendation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2014 IEEE 14th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Athens

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICALT.2014.158

Filename

6901534