Aligning Learning Outcomes to Learning Resources: A Lexico-Semantic Spatial
Approach
Abstract
Aligning Learning Outcomes (LO) to relevant portions of Learning Resources (LR) is necessary to
help students quickly navigate within the recommended learning material. In general, the problem
can be viewed as finding the relevant sections of a
document (LR) that is pertinent to a broad question
(LO). In this paper, we introduce the novel problem of aligning LOs (LO is usually a sentence long
text) to relevant pages of LRs (LRs are in the form
of slide decks). We observe that the set of relevant pages can be composed of multiple chunks (a
chunk is a contiguous set of pages) and the same
page of an LR might be relevant to multiple LOs.
To this end, we develop a novel Lexico-Semantic
Spatial approach that captures the lexical, semantic, and spatial aspects of the task, and also alleviates the limited availability of training data. Our
approach first identifies the relevancy of a page to
an LO by using lexical and semantic features from
each page independently. The spatial model at a
later stage exploits the dependencies between the
sequence of pages in the LR to further improve the
alignment task. We empirically establish the importance of the lexical, semantic, and spatial models
within the proposed approach. We show that, on
average, a student can navigate to a relevant page
from the first predicted page by about four clicks
within a 38 page slide deck, as compared to two
clicks by human experts