With large student enrollment, MOOC instructors face the unique challenge in deciding when to intervene in forum discussions with their limited bandwidth. We study this problem of instructor intervention. Using a large sample of forum data culled from 61 courses, we design a binary classifier to predict whether an instructor should intervene in a discussion thread or not. By incorporating novel information about a forum's type into the classification process, we improve significantly over the previous state-of-the-art. We show how difficult this decision problem is in the real world by validating against indicative human judgment, and empirically show the problem's sensitivity to instructors' intervention preferences. We conclude this paper with our take on the future research issues in intervention.
Among works on forum information retrieval, we focus on those that focus on forum moderation as their purpose is similar to the instructor's role in a course forum. While early work focused on automated spam filtering, recent works shifted focus towards curating large volumes of posts on social media platforms @cite_16 to distil the relevant few. Specifically, those that strive to identify thread solvedness @cite_5 @cite_7 and completeness @cite_11 are similar to our problem.
@cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_7 @cite_11
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Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to the users. Finding relevant answers is particularly hard in software forums as: complexities of software systems cause a huge variety of issues often expressed in similar technical jargons, and software forum users are often expert internet users who often posts answers in multiple venues creating many duplicate posts, often without satisfying answers, in the world wide web. To address this problem, this paper provides a semantic search engine framework to process software threads and recover relevant answers according to user queries. Different from standard information retrieval engine, our framework infer semantic tags of posts in the software forum threads and utilize these tags to recover relevant answer posts. In our case study, we analyze 6,068 posts from three software forums. In terms of accuracy of our inferred tags, we could achieve on average an overall precision, recall and F-measure of 67 , 71 , and 69 respectively. To empirically study the benefit of our overall framework, we also conduct a user-assisted study which shows that as compared to a standard information retrieval approach, our proposed framework could increase mean average precision from 17 to 71 in retrieving relevant answers to various queries and achieve a Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) @1 score of 91.2 and nDCG@2 score of 71.6 . We are experiencing an unprecedented increase of content contributed by users in forums such as blogs, social networking sites and microblogging services. Such abundance of content complements content on web sites and traditional media forums such as news papers, news and financial streams, and so on. Given such plethora of information there is a pressing need to cross reference information across textual services. For example, commonly we read a news item and we wonder if there are any blogs reporting related content or vice versa. In this paper, we present techniques to automate the process of cross referencing online information content. We introduce methodologies to extract phrases from a given "query document" to be used as queries to search interfaces with the goal to retrieve content related to the query document. In particular, we consider two techniques to extract and score key phrases. We also consider techniques to complement extracted phrases with information present in external sources such as Wikipedia and introduce an algorithm called RelevanceRank for this purpose. We discuss both these techniques in detail and provide an experimental study utilizing a large number of human judges from Amazons's Mechanical Turk service. Detailed experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed techniques for the task of automating retrieval of documents related to a query document. As course management systems (CMS) gain popularity in facilitating teaching. A forum is a key component to facilitate the interactions among students and teachers. Content analysis is the most popular way to study a discussion forum. But content analysis is a human labor intensity process; for example, the coding process relies heavily on manual interpretation; and it is time and energy consuming. In an asynchronous virtual learning environment, an instructor needs to keep monitoring the discussion forum from time to time in order to maintain the quality of a discussion forum. However, it is time consuming and difficult for instructors to fulfill this need especially for K12 teachers. This research proposes a genre classification system, called GCS, to facilitate the automatic coding process. We treat the coding process as a document classification task via modern data mining techniques. The genre of a posting can be perceived as an announcement, a question, clarification, interpretation, conflict, assertion, etc. This research examines the coding coherence between GCS and experts' judgment in terms of recall and precision, and discusses how we adjust the parameters of the GCS to improve the coherence. Based on the empirical results, GCS adopts the cascade classification model to achieve the automatic coding process. The empirical evaluation of the classified genres from a repository of postings in an online course on earth science in a senior high school shows that GCS can effectively facilitate the coding process, and the proposed cascade model can deal with the imbalanced distribution nature of discussion postings. These results imply that GCS based on the cascade model can perform as an automatic posting coding system. We propose a new unsupervised learning technique for extracting information from large text collections. We model documents as if they were generated by a two-stage stochastic process. Each author is represented by a probability distribution over topics, and each topic is represented as a probability distribution over words for that topic. The words in a multi-author paper are assumed to be the result of a mixture of each authors' topic mixture. The topic-word and author-topic distributions are learned from data in an unsupervised manner using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We apply the methodology to a large corpus of 160,000 abstracts and 85,000 authors from the well-known CiteSeer digital library, and learn a model with 300 topics. We discuss in detail the interpretation of the results discovered by the system including specific topic and author models, ranking of authors by topic and topics by author, significant trends in the computer science literature between 1990 and 2002, parsing of abstracts by topics and authors and detection of unusual papers by specific authors. An online query interface to the model is also discussed that allows interactive exploration of author-topic models for corpora such as CiteSeer.