Distinguishing defined concepts from prerequisite concepts in learning resources

Abstract

The objective of any tutoring system is to provide meaningful learning to the learner, thence it is important to know whether a concept mentioned in a document is a prerequisite for studying that document, or it can be learned from it. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying defined concepts and prerequisite concepts from learning resources available on the web. Statistics and machine learning tools are exploited in order to predict the class of each concept. Two groups of features are constructed to categorise the concepts: contextual features and local features. The contextual features enclose linguistic information and the local features contain the concept properties such as font size and font weigh. An aggregation method is proposed as a solution to the problem of the multiple occurrences of a defined concept in a document. This paper shows that best results are obtained with the SVM classifier than with other classifiers.