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.