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 Learning Management


What Should I Learn First: Introducing LectureBank for NLP Education and Prerequisite Chain Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recent years have witnessed the rising popularity of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Many online courses and resources are available even for those without a strong background in the field. Often the student is curious about a specific topic but does not quite know where to begin studying. To answer the question of "what should one learn first," we apply an embedding-based method to learn prerequisite relations for course concepts in the domain of NLP. We introduce LectureBank, a dataset containing 1,352 English lecture files collected from university courses which are each classified according to an existing taxonomy as well as 208 manually-labeled prerequisite relation topics, which is publicly available. The dataset will be useful for educational purposes such as lecture preparation and organization as well as applications such as reading list generation. Additionally, we experiment with neural graph-based networks and non-neural classifiers to learn these prerequisite relations from our dataset.



Resource Mention Extraction for MOOC Discussion Forums

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In discussions hosted on discussion forums for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), references to online learning resources are often of central importance. However they are usually mentioned in free text, without appropriate hyperlinking to their associated resource. Automated learning resource mention hyperlinking and categorization will facilitate discussion and searching within MOOC forums, and also benefit the contextualization of such resources across disparate views. We propose the novel problem of learning resource mention identification inMOOC forums; i.e., to identify resource mentions in discussions, and classify them into predefined resource types. As this is a novel task with no publicly available data, we first contribute a large-scale labeled dataset - dubbed the Forum Resource Mention (FoRM) dataset - to facilitate our current research and future research on this task. FoRM contains over 10, 000 real-world forum threads in collaboration with Coursera, with more than 23, 000 manually labeled resource mentions. We then formulate this task as a sequence tagging problem and investigate solutionarchitectures to address the problem. Corresponding author Email address: peterpan10211020@gmail.com (Liangming Pan) Preprint submitted to Elsevier November 22, 2018 two major challenges that hinder the application of sequence tagging models tothe task: (1) the diversity of resource mention expression, and (2) long-range contextual dependencies. We address these challenges by incorporating character-leveland thread context information into a LSTM-CRF model. First, we incorporate a character encoder to address the out-ofvocabulary problemcaused by the diversity of mention expressions. Second, to address the context dependency challenge, we encode thread contexts using anRNN-based context encoder, and apply the attention mechanism to selectively leverage useful context information during sequence tagging. Experiments onFoRM show that the proposed method improves the baseline deep sequence tagging models notably, significantly bettering performance on instances that exemplify the two challenges.


The business LMS โ€“ from basic requirement to learning ecosystem MATRIX Blog

#artificialintelligence

Learning management systems are not new to corporate learning; they have been around for quite some time and each year more and more are released. What an LMS basically does is host, distribute, record and report on all learning that goes on within an organization. Apart from that, there are many more additional features that companies ask for and expect today. Probably the most difficult one to incorporate is tracking all informal learning and using the information to provide highly personalized learning. The LMS is the critical component to the entire e-learning program, acting both as the foundation (by incorporating all the modules) and as the engine (by providing the environment in which learners can access them and suggesting various topics based on curriculum and personal interest).


Andrew Ng launches 'AI for Everyone,' a new Coursera program aimed at business professionals

#artificialintelligence

Andrew Ng, a computer scientist who led Google's AI division, Google Brain, and formerly served as vice president and chief scientist at Baidu, is a veritable celebrity in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. After leaving Baidu, he debuted an online curriculum of classes centered around machine learning -- Deeplearning.ai Ng was the keynote speaker at the AI Frontiers Conference in November 2017, and this year unveiled the AI Fund, a $175 million incubator that backs small teams of experts looking to solve key problems using machine learning. Oh, and he's also chairman of AI cognitive behavioral therapy startup Woebot; sits on the board of driverless car company Drive.ai; Yet somehow, he found time to put together a new online training course -- "AI for Everyone" -- that seeks to demystify AI for business executives.



Community Exploration: From Offline Optimization to Online Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce the community exploration problem that has many real-world applications such as online advertising. In the problem, an explorer allocates limited budget to explore communities so as to maximize the number of members he could meet. We provide a systematic study of the community exploration problem, from offline optimization to online learning. For the offline setting where the sizes of communities are known, we prove that the greedy methods for both of non-adaptive exploration and adaptive exploration are optimal. For the online setting where the sizes of communities are not known and need to be learned from the multi-round explorations, we propose an `upper confidence' like algorithm that achieves the logarithmic regret bounds. By combining the feedback from different rounds, we can achieve a constant regret bound.


A Local Regret in Nonconvex Online Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider an online learning process to forecast a sequence of outcomes for nonconvex models. A typical measure to evaluate online learning algorithms is regret but such standard definition of regret is intractable for nonconvex models even in offline settings. Hence, gradient based definition of regrets are common for both offline and online nonconvex problems. Recently, a notion of local gradient based regret was introduced. Inspired by the concept of calibration and a local gradient based regret, we introduce another definition of regret and we discuss why our definition is more interpretable for forecasting problems. We also provide bound analysis for our regret under certain assumptions.


Modelling student online behaviour in a virtual learning environment

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In recent years, distance education has enjoyed a major boom. Much work at The Open University (OU) has focused on improving retention rates in these modules by providing timely support to students who are at risk of failing the module. In this paper we explore methods for analysing student activity in online virtual learning environment (VLE) -- General Unary Hypotheses Automaton (GUHA) and Markov chain-based analysis -- and we explain how this analysis can be relevant for module tutors and other student support staff. We show that both methods are a valid approach to modelling student activities. An advantage of the Markov chain-based approach is in its graphical output and in the possibility to model time dependencies of the student activities.