Explanation Mining

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Explanations are used to provide an understanding of a concept, procedure, or reasoning to others. Although explanations are present online ubiquitously within textbooks, discussion forums, and many more, there is no way to mine them automatically to assist learners in seeking an explanation. To address this problem, we propose the task of Explanation Mining. To mine explanations of educational concepts, we propose a baseline approach based on the Language Modeling approach of information retrieval. Preliminary results suggest that incorporating knowledge from a model trained on the ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five) dataset in the form of a document prior helps increase the performance of a standard retrieval model. This is encouraging because our method requires minimal in-domain supervision, as a result, it can be deployed for multiple online courses. We also suggest some interesting future work in the computational analysis of explanations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationL@S 2020 - Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages321-324
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379519
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 12 2020
Event7th Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, L@S 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Aug 12 2020Aug 14 2020

Publication series

NameL@S 2020 - Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

Conference

Conference7th Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, L@S 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/12/208/14/20

Keywords

  • explanations
  • language modeling for information retrieval
  • prior probability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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