Computer Science

The paper presents a method and an implemented system for the assessment of the participants' competences in a collaborative environment based on an instant messenger conversation (chat). For each utterance in the chat, a score is computed that takes into account several features, specific to text mining (like the presence and the density of keywords, via synonymy), natural language pragmatics and to social networks. The total rating of the competence of a participant is computed considering the scores of utterances ...

Abstract. With the continuous evolution of collaborative environments, the needs of automatic analyses and assessment of participants in instant messenger conferences (chat) have become essential. For these aims, on one hand, a series of factors based on natural language processing (including lexical analysis and Latent Semantic Analysis) and data-mining have been taken into consideration. On the other hand, in order to thoroughly assess participants, measures as Page's essay grading, readability and social networks analysis ...

Abstract. We describe the main tasks students usually complete when working in an elearning platform, across five mean features that have to be taken into account in research efforts (writing-based activities, individual/collective level, knowledge/pedagogy orientation, feedback, multiple stakeholders account). Ways to analyse and assist these tasks by (semi)-automatic assessments using NLP techniques is discussed. Two services aiming to assist writing-based tasks are presented along with their first validation.

Résumé: Cet article présente un environnement-tuteur d'apprentissage pouvant s' insérer dans une plate-forme de FOAD permettant à des étudiants de prendre connaissance et de réviser des contenus de cours. Cet environnement puise son originalité dans le fait qu'il allie une approche cognitive et des références à l'apprentissage dialogique pour permettre:—de fournir aux apprenants les cours les plus pertinents à étudier étant donné leur compréhension du cours;—de délivrer des feedback sur la compréhension d'un cours et ...

Abstract. We present a method devised to automatically analyze pupils' verbalizations during reading and to reveal some of the strategies they use. An experiment with 44 primary school pupils (3rd and 5th grade) reading a narrative text and verbalizing what they understood at predefined breaks showed, firstly, that machine results are correlated with experts'; secondly, that the recall of recent sentences is not uniform across verbalizations and subject to a grade effect; thirdly, that there is a grade effect in the recall of distal causal ...

Building a dependable hierarchy of users and posts by analyzing forums proves to be a complex and time consuming task, while its importance increases with the wider spread of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments. In this context, building a system that automatically assesses posts or utterances, predefined discussion threads and users seemed more than appropriate since no system addresses in detail this kind of task. In order to obtain a holistic perspective and a deep and thorough analysis, ...

The paper presents a system for helping the analysis of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning chat (instant messenger) sessions, starting from a polyphonic model of the discourse inspired by the dialogistics of Bakhtin. Some theoretical basics of the model are presented, followed by implementation details and validation results.

With the increasing popularity and evolution of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning systems, the need for developing a tool that automatically assesses instant messaging conversations has become imperative. The main reasons are the high volume of data and the increased amount of time spent for manually assessing conversations. We propose an automated analysis system based on Natural Language Processing (centered on Latent Semantic Analysis and Social Network Analysis) and optimize its runtime ...

Abstract. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) considers that instant messaging and discussion forums are useful for connecting learners. However, there are only a few tools used for supporting the learners engaged in activities using these technologies. Thus, chats and forums are primarily used only as a communication device and not explicitly for learning. Once the conversation is over, the data is usually discarded and only rarely it is manually analyzed by tutors, teachers or other learners. This paper ...