Enriching Didactic Similarity Measures of Concept Maps by a Deep Learning Based Approach

Concept maps are significant tools able to support several tasks in the educational area such as curriculum design, knowledge organization and modeling, students’ assessment and many others. They are also successfully used in learning activities in which students have to represent domain knowledge according to teacher’s assignment. In this context, the development of Learning Analytics approaches would benefit of methods that automatically compare concept maps. Detecting concept maps similarities is relevant to identify how the same concepts are used in different knowledge representations. Algorithms for comparing graphs have been extensively studied in the literature, but they do not appear appropriate for concept maps. In concept maps, concepts exposed are at least as relevant as the structure that contains them. Neglecting the semantic and didactic aspect inevitably causes inaccuracies and the consequently limited applicability in Learning Analytics approaches. In this work, starting from an algorithm which compares didactic characteristic of concept maps, we present an extension which exploits a semantic approach to catch the actual meaning of the concepts expressed in the nodes of the map.