Knowledge models from PDF textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks are educational documents created, structured and formatted by domain experts with the primary purpose to explain the knowledge in the domain to a novice. Authors use their understanding of the domain when structuring and formatting the content of a textbook to facilitate this explanation. As a result, the formatting and structural elements of textbooks carry the elements of domain knowledge implicitly encoded by their authors. Our paper presents an extensible approach towards automated extraction of knowledge models from textbooks and enrichment of their content with additional links (both internal and external). The textbooks themselves essentially become hypertext documents where individual pages are annotated with important concepts in the domain. The evaluation experiments examine several aspects and stages of the approach, including the accuracy of model extraction, the pragmatic quality of extracted models using one of their possible applications-semantic linking of textbooks in the same domain, the accuracy of linking models to external knowledge sources and the effect of integration of multiple textbooks from the same domain. The results indicate high accuracy of model extraction on symbolic, syntactic and structural levels across textbooks and domains, and demonstrate the added value of the extracted models on the semantic level.

Empowering Asynchronous Arabic Language Learning Through PDF Hyperlink Media

“…The inclusion of hyperlinks inside PDFs can seamlessly incorporate diverse contents, providing students with an engaging and interactive educational experience (Alpizar-Chacon et al, 2020;Alpizar-Chacon & Sosnovsky, 2021). This methodology establishes a connection between fundamental ideas and additional resources, such as films and interactive games, which encourages active engagement from students (Lang & Baehr, 2023).…”

What’s in an Index: Extracting Domain-specific Knowledge Graphs from Textbooks

“…As mentioned, we have previously developed a method for the automated extraction of knowledge models from textbooks [5]. Figure 2.A presents a summarized version of this process.…”

“…We have paid special attention to the index sections of the processed textbooks as the source of fine-grained domain terminology and text annotations. We have been able to automatically link index terms to their corresponding resources in DBpedia 5 , thus enriching our textbook models with additional semantic information and connecting them to the open linked data cloud [3].…”

The return of intelligent textbooks

“…2017). Ultimately, this line of research leads to automatic construction of full concept‐based domain models “behind pages” (Alpizar‐Chacon and Sosnovsky 2021). These models can be used to support intelligent and adaptive services pioneered by the early textbooks (such as concept‐based navigation or integration of external content), yet without expensive manual knowledge engineering.…”