Nirmal Gelal

Nirmal Gelal, Chloe Snow, Ambyr Rios et al.

High school English Literature teachers often encounter barriers to assembling diverse, thematically aligned text sets due to limited planning time and pedagogical resources. To address this need, we present T-TExTS (Teaching Text Expansion for Teacher Scaffolding), a knowledge graph (KG)-based recommendation system that suggests literature texts based on pedagogical merit rather than surface-level metadata. We construct a domain-specific ontology using the Knowledge Acquisition and Representation Methodology (KNARM), instantiate it as a knowledge graph with separate Terminological Box (TBox) and Assertional Box (ABox) components, and evaluate four graph embedding strategies (DeepWalk, biased random walk, hybrid embedding, and Node2Vec) across three dataset configurations (98, 196, and 351 texts) and two relation-weighting schemes. The experimental results reveal that traversal-level expert weighting alone does not outperform algorithmic structural tuning: Node2Vec achieves the highest Area Under the Curve (AUC) at every dataset size (0.9642--0.9750) and the strongest ranking metrics (Hits@K, MRR, nDCG) at larger scales. Combining structural and pedagogical signals through embedding concatenation, however, preserves both interpretability and competitive ranking quality, with the hybrid model maintaining a high AUC across all scales (0.9122--0.9350) and remaining within a few percentage points of Node2Vec on every ranking metric. These findings highlight the value of ontology-driven knowledge graph embeddings for educational recommendation systems and demonstrate that T-TExTS can meaningfully ease the burden of English Literature text selection for secondary educators, supporting more informed and inclusive curricular decisions. The source code for T-TExTS is available at https://github.com/koncordantlab/TTExTS.

Nirmal Gelal, Aastha Gautam, Sanaz Saki Norouzi et al.

Sustainable agricultural production aligns with several sustainability goals established by the United Nations (UN). However, there is a lack of studies that comprehensively examine sustainable agricultural practices across various products and production methods. Such research could provide valuable insights into the diverse factors influencing the sustainability of specific crops and produce while also identifying practices and conditions that are universally applicable to all forms of agricultural production. While this research might help us better understand sustainability, the community would still need a consistent set of vocabularies. These consistent vocabularies, which represent the underlying datasets, can then be stored in a global food systems datahub. The standardized vocabularies might help encode important information for further statistical analyses and AI/ML approaches in the datasets, resulting in the research targeting sustainable agricultural production. A structured method of representing information in sustainability, especially for wheat production, is currently unavailable. In an attempt to address this gap, we are building a set of ontologies and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) that encode knowledge associated with sustainable wheat production using formal logic. The data for this set of knowledge graphs are collected from public data sources, experimental results collected at our experiments at Kansas State University, and a Sustainability Workshop that we organized earlier in the year, which helped us collect input from different stakeholders throughout the value chain of wheat. The modeling of the ontology (i.e., the schema) for the Knowledge Graph has been in progress with the help of our domain experts, following a modular structure using KNARM methodology. In this paper, we will present our preliminary results and schemas of our Knowledge Graph and ontologies.