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Explanation Mining

Published: 12 August 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Explanations are used to provide an understanding of a concept, procedure, or reasoning to others. Although explanations are present online ubiquitously within textbooks, discussion forums, and many more, there is no way to mine them automatically to assist learners in seeking an explanation. To address this problem, we propose the task of Explanation Mining. To mine explanations of educational concepts, we propose a baseline approach based on the Language Modeling approach of information retrieval. Preliminary results suggest that incorporating knowledge from a model trained on the ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five) dataset in the form of a document prior helps increase the performance of a standard retrieval model. This is encouraging because our method requires minimal in-domain supervision, as a result, it can be deployed for multiple online courses. We also suggest some interesting future work in the computational analysis of explanations.

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References

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Christopher JC Burges. 2010. From ranknet to lambdarank to lambdamart: An overview. Learning 11, 23--581 (2010), 81.
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Andrew Head, Codanda Appachu, Marti A Hearst, and Björn Hartmann. 2015. Tutorons: Generating context-relevant, on-demand explanations and demonstrations of online code. In 2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE, 3--12.
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Carl G Hempel and Paul Oppenheim. 1948. Studies in the Logic of Explanation. Philosophy of science 15, 2 (1948), 135--175.
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Gaea Leinhardt. 2001. Instructional explanations: A commonplace for teaching and location for contrast. Handbook of research on teaching 4 (2001), 333--357.
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Sean Massung, Chase Geigle, and ChengXiang Zhai. 2016. MeTA: A Unified Toolkit for Text Retrieval and Analysis. In Proceedings of ACL-2016 System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, 91--96.
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Edward Shortliffe. 2012. Computer-based medical consultations: MYCIN. Vol. 2. Elsevier.
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Chengxiang Zhai and John Lafferty. 2017. A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to ad hoc information retrieval. In ACM SIGIR Forum, Vol. 51. ACM New York, NY, USA, 268--276.
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ChengXiang Zhai and Sean Massung. 2016. Text data management and analysis: a practical introduction to information retrieval and text mining. Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool.

Cited By

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  • (2023)HUMMUS: A Linked, Healthiness-Aware, User-centered and Argument-Enabling Recipe Data Set for RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3609491(1-11)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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L@S '20: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
August 2020
442 pages
ISBN:9781450379519
DOI:10.1145/3386527
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 August 2020

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Author Tags

  1. explanations
  2. language modeling for information retrieval
  3. prior probability

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L@S '20

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Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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  • (2023)HUMMUS: A Linked, Healthiness-Aware, User-centered and Argument-Enabling Recipe Data Set for RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3609491(1-11)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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