Automatic Support for the Analysis of Online Collaborative Learning Chat Conversations - ICHL 2010

Stefan Trausan-MatuUniversitatea “Politehnica” Bucuresti,

Institutul de Cercetari în Inteligenta Artificiala al Academiei Române

Outlook� The Hybrid Learning Scenario

� The Polyphonic Model of Discourse

� The PolyCAFe Analysis System

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The Hybrid Learning Scenario � Classroom lectures

� Individual study of learning materials

� Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)

in small groups using online instant messenger chats � in small groups using online instant messenger chats (Stahl 2006)

� Un-moderated (due to the large number of students)

� For discussing topics assigned by tutors in relation to the lectures.


The Scenario has been used for

�More than 800 Computer Science students at Bucharest “Politehnica” University, Romania since 2005, at the courses:

Human-Computer Interaction (undergraduate) debate �Human-Computer Interaction (undergraduate) debate and design�Algorithm Design (undergraduate) problem solving�Natural Language Processing (master) debate and design�Collaborative and Adaptive Systems (master) design a presentation

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The VMT (Stahl 2009) chat environment

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The VMT Referencing facility


The XML Encoding

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Example of a CSCL Assignment� Students had to debate in chat sessions in groups

ranging from 3 to 8

� In the first part of the conversation, each student had to defend a technology by presenting its features and to defend a technology by presenting its features and advantages and criticize the others by invoking their flaws and drawbacks

� In the final part of the chat, they had to discuss on how they could integrate all these technologies in a single online collaboration platform


Tutors reported that the analysis:�is extremely time consuming, it takes about twice the actual duration of the online chat

�They needed to walkthrough more than once the conversations in order to evaluate it

�It proved to be very difficult to follow the threading �It proved to be very difficult to follow the threading of discussions – there were very long chains and it was very hard to remember what said each student, and to asses their contributions

�It was very difficult to identify important utterances/contributions because only afterwards this judgment may be done, after seeing the effect of these utterances on the subsequent ones.


Our Theoretical Model is based

on Mikhail Bakhtin’s

� Dialogism - basis for the CSCL paradigm (Koschman, 1999) “… Any true understanding is (Koschman, 1999) “… Any true understanding is dialogic in nature” (Voloshinov-Bakhtin, 1973)

� Polyphony and Inter-animation of voices


The polyphonic analysis

of CSCL chats � May be used for understanding the mechanisms of

knowledge building in collaborative chats (Trausan-Matu, 2006), in particular and in hybrid learning, in generallearning, in general

� Is a problem similar to that of an inexperienced listener who does not comprehend a lot when hearing a complex classical music piece, for example, a fugue written by Johann Sebastian Bach.


Confucius� “was a devotee of music and noted a close kinship

between humaneness (jen) and music presumably because the former, like the latter, aims at the harmony of relationships”of relationships”

� “it is impossible to understand man without understanding the power of words (language)” (Hwa Yol Jung, 1993)


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Polyphony

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LTfLL - EU FP7 Project

(2008-2011)

� Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning

� Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Ausria, Romania, BulgariaRomania, Bulgaria

� The PolyCAFe system (Polyphony-based Collaboration Analysis and Feedback generation)

� The system has just been validated with students and tutors


The Architecture of PolyCAFe

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NLP pipe� spelling correction, stemmer, tokenizer, Named Entity

Recognizer, POS tagger and parser, and NP-chunker.

� Stanford NLP software (http://nlp.stanford.edu/software)

� Spellchecker : Jazzy � Spellchecker : Jazzy http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jazzy/

� Alternative NLP pipes are under development,

� GATE (http://gate.ac.uk)

� LingPipe (http://aliasi.com/lingpipe/).


Social network analysis� Consider explicit and implicit referencing as arcs

between participants, which are the nodes

� A kind of page-rank algorithm – an utterance is important if it is referred by important utterances; The important if it is referred by important utterances; The strength of a voice (of an utterance) depends on the strength of the utterances that refer to it

� Determines if a person is central/peripheral


Polyphony, Inter-animation and

Collaboration analysis� Assign an importance value for each utterance

considering several indicators of inter-animation (collaboration)� Detection of chains of inter-animation patterns � Detection of chains of inter-animation patterns

(Trausan-Matu, 2007) in the chat� Consider several criteria such as the presence in the chat

of questions, agreement, disagreement� Presence of others’ voices� Social Networks metrics

� Machine learning approach (genetic algorithms and neural networks) for tuning the


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Conclusions� PolyCAfe was validated under the LTfLL project

(Rebedea and all, 2010)

� The system will be freely available on the web


Conclusions (cont.)� Polyphony and inter-animation provide a basis for an

unifying theoretical background for different types of learning: face-to-face, to a distance, using electronic means, and even individually. In each of these types means, and even individually. In each of these types several voices should be present (actually, virtually or as an echo in Bakhtin’s sense)

� Polyphony and inter-animation of the voices of the professor, of the learner, of the authors of read documents, of chat colleagues …

� Confucius Harmony?


Thank You!

Questions?

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Education

Automatic Support for the Analysis of Online Collaborative Learning Chat Conversations - ICHL 2010