Atish Pawar

Atish Pawar, Sahib Budhiraja, Daniel Kivi et al.

The course description provided by instructors is an important piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course description is the Learning Outcomes section. The contents of this section are used by program managers who are tasked to compare and match two different courses during the development of Transfer Agreements between different institutions. This research introduces the development of visual tools for understanding the two different courses and making comparisons. We designed methods to extract the text from a course description document, developed an algorithm to perform semantic analysis, and displayed the results in a web interface. We are able to achieve the intermediate results of the research which includes extracting, analyzing and visualizing the data.

Atish Pawar, Vijay Mago

The course description provided by instructors is an essential piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course description is the Learning Objectives section. The contents of this section are used by program managers who are tasked to compare and match two different courses during the development of Transfer Agreements between various institutions. This research introduces the development of semantic similarity algorithms to calculate the similarity between two learning objectives of the same domain. We present a novel methodology which deals with the semantic similarity by using a previously established algorithm and integrating it with the domain corpus utilizing domain statistics. The disambiguated domain serves as a supervised learning data for the algorithm. We also introduce Bloom Index to calculate the similarity between action verbs in the Learning Objectives referring to the Blooms taxonomy.

Atish Pawar, Vijay Mago

Calculating the semantic similarity between sentences is a long dealt problem in the area of natural language processing. The semantic analysis field has a crucial role to play in the research related to the text analytics. The semantic similarity differs as the domain of operation differs. In this paper, we present a methodology which deals with this issue by incorporating semantic similarity and corpus statistics. To calculate the semantic similarity between words and sentences, the proposed method follows an edge-based approach using a lexical database. The methodology can be applied in a variety of domains. The methodology has been tested on both benchmark standards and mean human similarity dataset. When tested on these two datasets, it gives highest correlation value for both word and sentence similarity outperforming other similar models. For word similarity, we obtained Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8753 and for sentence similarity, the correlation obtained is 0.8794.