A Semantic Rule-based Framework for Efficient Retrieval of Educational Materials

• Published in: Electronic Journal of E-Learning Vol. 11; no. 3; pp. 182 - 192
• Main Authors: Mahmoudi, Maryam Tayefeh, Taghiyareh, Fattaneh, Badie, Kambiz
• Format: Trade Publication Article Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Reading Academic Conferences International Limited 01.08.2013; Academic Conferences Limited
• Subjects: Educational Finance; Educational Objectives; Educational Resources; Information Retrieval; Instructional Materials; Semantics
• ISSN: 1479-4403; 1479-4403

Retrieving resources in an appropriate manner has a promising role in increasing the performance of educational support systems. A variety of works have been done to organize materials for educational purposes using tagging techniques. Despite the effectiveness of these techniques within certain domains, organizing resources in a way being adequately reusable for support purposes is still in the offing. In this paper a semantic approach is proposed to increase performance of retrieving educational materials based on using frames. Here, frames are used to represent the very knowledge necessary for realizing the similarity/ relevance between query and supportive materials. Owing to the complexity in semantic handling of the entire text, the suggested frame-based approach is applied only to the titles or subtitles, or in general the main headings, in the material. To make these frames comprehensive, we have made use of two attributes called "Major Characteristics" and "Basic Constituents", which are responsible respectively for "the goal behind a conceptual entity (Why/ for What a conceptual entity is being used)" and "the basic elements supporting a conceptual entity (How / in What way a conceptual entity is realized)". Conceptual entities here stand for the entire ideas belonging to headings (titles or subtitles) in a material. These attributes seem to have enough potential for representing the knowledge of titles and sub-titles in a way reflecting the content of the paragraphs in a reasonable way. To evaluate the capability of the proposed approach, retrieving materials within the domain of Multi-Agent Systems (a subject of high concern in Artificial Intelligence) was picked out as the benchmark problem. According to this benchmark, materials are retrieved based on the user's desire. Taking this point into account, we made a dataset for the subject of Multi-Agent Systems as an educational resource in academia, within which a number of users' desires from different groups were considered as possible queries, and the corresponding materials were then retrieved using the proposed approach. Computer experiments show acceptable precision and recall values for these queries with a quite good balance between them which is represented in terms of F-measure. The findings lead us to the fact that "Major Characteristics" and "Basic Constituents" have the ability to increase the status of re-usability for the stored materials. Moreover, the fact that materials can be reused efficiently, leads us to the point that our proposed representation scheme can be useful for educational support issues in the situations where user's desire is complex enough to the extent that several materials ought to be merged together to yield the requested material.