Using Discourse Signals for Robust Instructor Intervention Prediction

We tackle the prediction of instructor intervention in student posts from discussion forums in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Our key finding is that using automatically obtained discourse relations improves the prediction of when instructors intervene in student discussions, when compared with a state-of-the-art, feature-rich baseline. Our supervised classifier makes use of an automatic discourse parser which outputs Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) tags that represent in-post discourse features. We show PDTB relation-based features increase the robustness of the classifier and complement baseline features in recalling more diverse instructor intervention patterns. In comprehensive experiments over 14 MOOC offerings from several disciplines, the PDTB discourse features improve performance on average. The resultant models are less dependent on domain-specific vocabulary, allowing them to better generalize to new courses.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/03/2010

A PDTB-Styled End-to-End Discourse Parser

We have developed a full discourse parser in the Penn Discourse Treebank...
research
10/31/2017

Shallow Discourse Parsing with Maximum Entropy Model

In recent years, more research has been devoted to studying the subtask ...
research
08/19/2017

The CLaC Discourse Parser at CoNLL-2015

This paper describes our submission (kosseim15) to the CoNLL-2015 shared...
research
09/07/2017

Leveraging Discourse Information Effectively for Authorship Attribution

We explore techniques to maximize the effectiveness of discourse informa...
research
05/14/2017

Joint Modeling of Content and Discourse Relations in Dialogues

We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion poin...
research
05/26/2019

When to reply? Context Sensitive Models to Predict Instructor Interventions in MOOC Forums

Due to time constraints, course instructors often need to selectively pa...
research
01/08/2020

A Neural Approach to Discourse Relation Signal Detection

Previous data-driven work investigating the types and distributions of d...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset