AWARE, Beyond Sentence Boundaries: A Contextual Transformer Framework for Identifying Cultural Capital in STEM Narratives
This work addresses the challenge of detecting nuanced themes in educational texts for fostering equitable learning environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying cultural capital themes in student STEM narratives, which are difficult for standard NLP models due to their reliance on narrative context, and introduced the AWARE framework that outperformed a baseline by 2.1 percentage points in Macro-F1.
Identifying cultural capital (CC) themes in student reflections can offer valuable insights that help foster equitable learning environments in classrooms. However, themes such as aspirational goals or family support are often woven into narratives, rather than appearing as direct keywords. This makes them difficult to detect for standard NLP models that process sentences in isolation. The core challenge stems from a lack of awareness, as standard models are pre-trained on general corpora, leaving them blind to the domain-specific language and narrative context inherent to the data. To address this, we introduce AWARE, a framework that systematically attempts to improve a transformer model's awareness for this nuanced task. AWARE has three core components: 1) Domain Awareness, adapting the model's vocabulary to the linguistic style of student reflections; 2) Context Awareness, generating sentence embeddings that are aware of the full essay context; and 3) Class Overlap Awareness, employing a multi-label strategy to recognize the coexistence of themes in a single sentence. Our results show that by making the model explicitly aware of the properties of the input, AWARE outperforms a strong baseline by 2.1 percentage points in Macro-F1 and shows considerable improvements across all themes. This work provides a robust and generalizable methodology for any text classification task in which meaning depends on the context of the narrative.