A Review of the Analytics Techniques for an Efficient Management of Online Forums: An Architecture Proposal

E-learning is a response to the new educational needs of society and an important development in information and communication technologies because it represents the future of the teaching and learning processes. However, this trend presents many challenges, such as the processing of online forums which generate a huge number of messages with an unordered structure and a great variety of topics. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of a subject but the difficulty of following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may be counterproductive. The main goal of this paper is to review the approaches and techniques related to online courses in order to present a set of learning analytics techniques and a general architecture that solve the main challenges found in the state of the art by managing them in a more efficient way: 1) efficient tracking and monitoring of forums generated; 2) design of effective search mechanisms for questions and answers in the forums; and 3) extraction of relevant key performance indicators with the objective of carrying out an efficient management of online forums. In our proposal, natural language processing, clustering, information retrieval, question answering, and data mining techniques will be used.

[1]  Luísa Coheur,et al.  From symbolic to sub-symbolic information in question classification , 2011, Artificial Intelligence Review.

[2]  W. Bruce Croft,et al.  Analysis of Statistical Question Classification for Fact-Based Questions , 2005, Information Retrieval.

[3]  Omar El Beqqali,et al.  Harnessing Semantic Features for Large-Scale Content-Based Hashtag Recommendations on Microblogging Platforms , 2017 .

[4]  Benjamin V. Hanrahan,et al.  Modeling problem difficulty and expertise in stackoverflow , 2012, CSCW.

[5]  Seung Wook Lee,et al.  Collaborative Learning Agent for Promoting Group Interaction , 2006 .

[6]  Shafiq R. Joty,et al.  ConvKN at SemEval-2016 Task 3: Answer and Question Selection for Question Answering on Arabic and English Fora , 2016, *SEMEVAL.

[7]  Jun Chen,et al.  Semi-supervised learning for question classification in CQA , 2016, Natural Computing.

[8]  Higinio Mora Mora,et al.  Management of social networks in the educational process , 2015, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[9]  Manuel Palomar,et al.  An Empirical Approach to Spanish Anaphora Resolution , 1999, Machine Translation.

[10]  Gordon I. McCalla,et al.  Contexts in a paper recommendation system with collaborative filtering , 2012 .

[11]  Gilad Mishne,et al.  Finding high-quality content in social media , 2008, WSDM '08.

[12]  Shujian Huang,et al.  A Synthetic Approach for Recommendation: Combining Ratings, Social Relations, and Reviews , 2015, IJCAI.

[13]  Chirag Shah,et al.  Evaluating the quality of educational answers in community question-answering , 2016, 2016 IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).

[14]  Sanja Fidler,et al.  Skip-Thought Vectors , 2015, NIPS.

[15]  Claudio Carpineto,et al.  Comparing Weighting Models for Monolingual Information Retrieval , 2003, CLEF.

[16]  Stephen W. Thomas.  Mining Software Repositories with Topic Models , 2012 .

[17]  Harith Alani,et al.  Automatic Identification of Best Answers in Online Enquiry Communities , 2012, ESWC.

[18]  Jun Zhao,et al.  Topic-sensitive probabilistic model for expert finding in question answer communities , 2012, CIKM.

[19]  J. Wenny Rahayu,et al.  Advanced Issues on Topic Detection, Tracking, and Trend Analysis for Social Multimedia , 2015, Adv. Multim..

[20]  Jun Suzuki,et al.  Question Classification using HDAG Kernel , 2003, ACL 2003.

[21]  Zengchang Qin,et al.  Question Classification using Head Words and their Hypernyms , 2008, EMNLP.

[22]  Phil Blunsom,et al.  A Convolutional Neural Network for Modelling Sentences , 2014, ACL.

[23]  Jorge Chávez,et al.  Structure and content of messages in an online environment: An approach from participation , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[24]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Hits on question answer portals: exploration of link analysis for author ranking , 2007, SIGIR.

[25]  Alton Yeow-Kuan Chua,et al.  Measuring the effectiveness of answers in Yahoo! Answers , 2015, Online Inf. Rev..

[26]  Vic Lally,et al.  Investigating patterns of interaction in networked learning and computer-supported collaborative learning: A role for Social Network Analysis , 2007, Int. J. Comput. Support. Collab. Learn..

[27]  Jennifer O'Rourke,et al.  Tutoring Large Numbers: An Unmet Challenge , 2004 .

[28]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle , 2009, KDD.

[29]  Higinio Mora Mora,et al.  Information Search Habits of First Year College Students , 2014, Int. J. Knowl. Soc. Res..

[30]  Mark Levene,et al.  Understanding user intent in community question answering , 2012, WWW.

[31]  Sanjeev Arora,et al.  A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Sentence Embeddings , 2017, ICLR.

[32]  Jeffrey Pennington,et al.  GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation , 2014, EMNLP.

[33]  Lise Getoor,et al.  Understanding MOOC Discussion Forums using Seeded LDA , 2014, BEA@ACL.

[34]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  A Neural Probabilistic Language Model , 2003, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[35]  Miltiadis D. Lytras,et al.  An emerging - Social and emerging computing enabled philosophical paradigm for collaborative learning systems: Toward high effective next generation learning systems for the knowledge society , 2015, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[36]  Xiaohua Hu,et al.  Identifying Authoritative and Reliable Contents in Community Question Answering with Domain Knowledge , 2013, PAKDD Workshops.

[37]  Gensheng Wang.  Research on Hotspot Discovery in Internet Public Opinions Based on Improved K-Means , 2013, Comput. Intell. Neurosci..

[38]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  Toward Semantics-Based Answer Pinpointing , 2001, HLT.

[39]  Lluís Padró,et al.  FreeLing 3.0: Towards Wider Multilinguality , 2012, LREC.

[40]  Byron Dom,et al.  A Bayesian Technique for Estimating the Credibility of question Answerers , 2008, SDM.

[41]  Peter Shea,et al.  Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster "epistemic engagement" and "cognitive presence" in online education , 2009, Comput. Educ..

[42]  Max Mühlhäuser,et al.  Automatically Assessing the Post Quality in Online Discussions on Software , 2007, ACL.

[43]  Jeffrey Pennington,et al.  Dynamic Pooling and Unfolding Recursive Autoencoders for Paraphrase Detection , 2011, NIPS.

[44]  Carolyn Penstein Rosé,et al.  “ Turn on , Tune in , Drop out ” : Anticipating student dropouts in Massive Open Online Courses , 2013 .

[45]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis , 2007, CIKM '07.

[46]  Tetsuya Sakai,et al.  Community QA Question Classification: Is the Asker Looking for Subjective Answers or Not? , 2011 .

[47]  Roberto Basili,et al.  KeLP at SemEval-2016 Task 3: Learning Semantic Relations between Questions and Answers , 2016, *SEMEVAL.

[48]  Alyssa Friend Wise,et al.  Mining for gold: Identifying content-related MOOC discussion threads across domains through linguistic modeling , 2017, Internet High. Educ..

[49]  Kevin Gimpel,et al.  Towards Universal Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings , 2015, ICLR.

[50]  Tammy Schellens,et al.  Content analysis schemes to analyze transcripts of online asynchronous discussion groups: A review , 2006, Comput. Educ..

[51]  James Allan,et al.  Taking Topic Detection From Evaluation to Practice , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[52]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Learning to recognize reliable users and content in social media with coupled mutual reinforcement , 2009, WWW '09.

[53]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Exploring question subjectivity prediction in community QA , 2008, SIGIR '08.

[54]  Pável Calado,et al.  Exploiting user feedback to learn to rank answers in q&a forums: a case study with stack overflow , 2013, SIGIR.

[55]  Yair Movshovitz-Attias,et al.  Analysis of the reputation system and user contributions on a question answering website: StackOverflow , 2013, 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2013).

[56]  Wilfred Ng,et al.  Expert Finding for Question Answering via Graph Regularized Matrix Completion , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[57]  P. Sivanandan,et al.  Online Forum: A Platform that Affects Students’ Learning? , 2014 .

[58]  Brian D. Davison,et al.  A classification-based approach to question answering in discussion boards , 2009, SIGIR.

[59]  Hongfei Lin,et al.  Predicting Best Answerers for New Questions: An Approach Leveraging Convolution Neural Networks in Community Question Answering , 2016, SMP.

[60]  Li Wang,et al.  Web Forum Retrieval and Text Analytics: A Survey , 2018, Found. Trends Inf. Retr..

[61]  Karthik Visweswariah,et al.  Semi-Supervised Answer Extraction from Discussion Forums , 2013, IJCNLP.

[62]  Yiming Yang,et al.  Topic Detection and Tracking Pilot Study Final Report , 1998 .

[63]  Antonio Ferrández Rodríguez.  Lexical and Syntactic knowledge for Information Retrieval , 2011, Inf. Process. Manag..

[64]  Marcos Borges,et al.  More Collaboration, More Collective Intelligence , 2015, Int. J. Knowl. Soc. Res..

[65]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  CoCQA: Co-Training over Questions and Answers with an Application to Predicting Question Subjectivity Orientation , 2008, EMNLP.

[66]  Avrim Blum,et al.  The Bottleneck , 2021, Monopsony Capitalism.

[67]  Janice Valerie Fordyce Brace-Govan,et al.  A method to track discussion forum activity: The Moderators' Assessment Matrix , 2003, Internet High. Educ..

[68]  Eric Zhi-Feng Liu,et al.  The Effects of Using Online Q&A Discussion Forums with Different Characteristics as a Learning Resource , 2013 .

[69]  Noriko Tomuro,et al.  The Use of Question Types to Match Questions in FAQFinder , 2002 .

[70]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms , 2007, WWW '07.

[71]  Dan Roth,et al.  Learning Question Classifiers , 2002, COLING.

[72]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Predicting information seeker satisfaction in community question answering , 2008, SIGIR '08.

[73]  Alejandro Maté,et al.  Application of Data Mining techniques to identify relevant Key Performance Indicators , 2017, Comput. Stand. Interfaces.

[74]  F. Maxwell Harper,et al.  Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites , 2009, CHI.

[75]  Nicolas Hernandez,et al.  MappSent: a Textual Mapping Approach for Question-to-Question Similarity , 2017, RANLP.

[76]  Jelena Jovanovic,et al.  Lexical Semantic Relatedness for Twitter Analytics , 2015, 2015 IEEE 27th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI).

[77]  Idan Szpektor,et al.  Will My Question Be Answered? Predicting "Question Answerability" in Community Question-Answering Sites , 2013, ECML/PKDD.

[78]  Jason Weston,et al.  A unified architecture for natural language processing: deep neural networks with multitask learning , 2008, ICML '08.

[79]  Wendy A. McKenzie,et al.  "I hope this goes somewhere": Evaluation of an online discussion group , 2000 .

[80]  David Gil,et al.  A Computational Method for Enabling Teaching-Learning Process in Huge Online Courses and Communities , 2017 .

[81]  Sidney K. D'Mello,et al.  Dialogue Modes in Expert Tutoring , 2008, Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

[82]  Desheng Dash Wu,et al.  Using text mining and sentiment analysis for online forums hotspot detection and forecast , 2010, Decis. Support Syst..

[83]  Yassine Jamoussi,et al.  Comprehensive classification of collaboration approaches in E-learning , 2017, Telematics Informatics.

[84]  Mehedi Masud.  Knowledge Update in Collaborative Knowledge Sharing Systems , 2015, Int. J. Knowl. Soc. Res..

[85]  Antonio Toral,et al.  Exploiting Wikipedia and EuroWordNet to solve Cross-Lingual Question Answering , 2009, Inf. Sci..

[86]  Patricio Martínez-Barco,et al.  Integrating Logic Forms and Anaphora Resolution in the AliQAn System , 2008, CLEF.

[87]  Javubar Sathick,et al.  A Generic Framework for Extraction of Knowledge from Social Web Sources (Social Networking Websites) for an Online Recommendation System. , 2015 .

[88]  Faïez Gargouri,et al.  Discovery Mechanism for Learning Semantic Web Service , 2016, Int. J. Semantic Web Inf. Syst..

[89]  P. Biyani.  Analyzing subjectivity and sentiment of online forums , 2014 .

[90]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  FALCON: Boosting Knowledge for Answer Engines , 2000, TREC.

[91]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  You Are What You Post : User-level Features in Threaded Discourse , 2009 .

[92]  Shengrui Wang,et al.  Identifying authoritative actors in question-answering forums: the case of Yahoo! answers , 2008, KDD.

[93]  Jacqueline Baxter,et al.  Roles and student identities in online large course forums: Implications for practice , 2014 .

[94]  Ee-Peng Lim,et al.  Quality-aware collaborative question answering: methods and evaluation , 2009, WSDM '09.

[95]  Ryan S. Hoover,et al.  Using NVivo to Answer the Challenges of Qualitative Research in Professional Communication: Benefits and Best Practices Tutorial , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[96]  Fernando Llopis,et al.  LEGOLANG: Técnicas de deconstrucción aplicadas a las Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano , 2013, Proces. del Leng. Natural.

[97]  C. Pechsiri,et al.  Developing a Why–How Question Answering system on community web boards with a causality graph including procedural knowledge , 2016 .

[98]  Jane Sinclair,et al.  Massive open online courses : learner participation , 2014 .

[99]  Weiguo Fan,et al.  ExpertRank: A topic-aware expert finding algorithm for online knowledge communities , 2013, Decis. Support Syst..

[100]  Adwait Ratnaparkhi,et al.  Question Answering Using Maximum-Entropy Components , 2001, NAACL.

[101]  Li Fan,et al.  Analyzing sentiments in Web 2.0 social media data in Chinese: experiments on business and marketing related Chinese Web forums , 2013, Inf. Technol. Manag..

[102]  Norazah Yusof,et al.  Students' Interactions in Online Asynchronous Discussion Forum: A Social Network Analysis , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Education Technology and Computer.

[103]  Yiqiang Chen,et al.  ASELM: Adaptive semi-supervised ELM with application in question subjectivity identification , 2016, Neurocomputing.

[104]  Philip S. Yu,et al.  Effective Crowd Expertise Modeling via Cross Domain Sparsity and Uncertainty Reduction , 2016, SDM.

[105]  Grégoire Burel.  Community and thread methods for identifying best answers in online question answering communities , 2016 .

[106]  Mark Guzdial,et al.  Effective Discussion Through a Computer-Mediated Anchored Forum , 2000 .

[107]  Karthik Visweswariah,et al.  Does Similarity Matter? The Case of Answer Extraction from Technical Discussion Forums , 2012, COLING.

[108]  Rafael Muñoz,et al.  An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Texts , 2001, CL.

[109]  Min Zhu,et al.  Modeling Temporal Behavior to Identify Potential Experts in Question Answering Communities , 2016, CDVE.

[110]  Preslav Nakov,et al.  SemEval-2017 Task 3: Community Question Answering , 2017, *SEMEVAL.

[111]  Eugene Agichtein,et al.  Finding the right facts in the crowd: factoid question answering over social media , 2008, WWW.

[112]  Preslav Nakov,et al.  SemEval-2016 Task 3: Community Question Answering , 2019, *SEMEVAL.

[113]  Sebastián Ventura,et al.  Predicting students' final performance from participation in on-line discussion forums , 2013, Comput. Educ..

[114]  Ming Zhou,et al.  Extracting Chatbot Knowledge from Online Discussion Forums , 2007, IJCAI.

[115]  Karen Swan,et al.  Building Knowledge Building Communities: Consistency, Contact and Communication in the Virtual Classroom , 2000 .

[116]  Jing He,et al.  Summarization of Yes/No Questions Using a Feature Function Model , 2011, ACML.

[117]  Ming Liu,et al.  An analysis of social support exchanges in online HIV/AIDS self-help groups , 2009, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[118]  Andrew Olney,et al.  Mining Collaborative Patterns in Tutorial Dialogues , 2010, EDM 2010.

[119]  Iryna Gurevych,et al.  Predicting the perceived quality of web forum posts , 2007 .

[120]  Idan Szpektor,et al.  Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers , 2012, WWW.

[121]  Chee Kheong Siew,et al.  Extreme learning machine: Theory and applications , 2006, Neurocomputing.

[122]  Tat-Seng Chua,et al.  A Pattern Matching Based Model for Implicit Opinion Question Identification , 2013, AAAI.

[123]  Naomie Salim,et al.  Hybridization of Bag-of-Words and Forum Metadata for Web Forum Question Post Detection , 2016 .

[124]  Vanessa Paz Dennen,et al.  Looking for evidence of learning: Assessment and analysis methods for online discourse , 2008, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[125]  Iryna Gurevych,et al.  Educational Question Answering based on Social Media Content , 2009, AIED.

[126]  Nayer M. Wanas,et al.  Automatic scoring of online discussion posts , 2008, WICOW '08.

[127]  Javi Fern.  GPLSI: Supervised Sentiment Analysis in Twitter using Skipgrams , 2014 .

[128]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report , 1999, TREC.

[129]  Yong Yu,et al.  Understanding and Summarizing Answers in Community-Based Question Answering Services , 2008, COLING.

[130]  Jihie Kim,et al.  Learning to Detect Conversation Focus of Threaded Discussions , 2006, NAACL.

[131]  Joseph A. Konstan,et al.  Evolution of Experts in Question Answering Communities , 2012, ICWSM.

[132]  Douglas B. Terry,et al.  Using collaborative filtering to weave an information tapestry , 1992, CACM.

[133]  Jeffrey Dean,et al.  Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality , 2013, NIPS.