Towards a fuzzy domain ontology extraction method for adaptive e-learning.

Lau, Raymond Y.K.; Song, Dawei; Li, Yuefeng; Cheung, Terence C.H.; Hao, Jin-Xing

Abstract

With the wide spread applications of e-Learning technologies to education at all levels, increasing number of online educational resources and messages are generated from the corresponding e-Learning environments. Accordingly, instructors are often overwhelmed by the huge number of messages created by students through online discussion forums. It is quite difficult, if not totally impossible, for instructors to read through and analyze these messages to understand the progress of their students on the fly. As a result, adaptive teaching for a large class is handicapped. The main contribution of this paper is the illustration of a novel concept map generation mechanism which is underpinned by a fuzzy domain ontology extraction algorithm. The proposed mechanism can automatically construct concept maps based on the messages posted to online discussion forums. Our initial experimental results reveal that the accuracy and the quality of the automatically generated concept maps are promising. Our research work opens the door to the development and application of intelligent software tools to enhance e-Learning. To our best knowledge, the work presented in this paper demonstrates the first application of fuzzy domain ontology extraction method to facilitate adaptive e-Learning.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 30, 2009
• Journal: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering
• Print ISSN: 1041-4347
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 800-813
• Institution Citation: LAU, R.Y.K., SONG, D., LI, Y., CHEUNG, T.C.H. and HAO, J.-X. 2009. Towards a fuzzy domain ontology extraction method for adaptive e-learning. IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering [online], 21(6), pages 800-813. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2008.137
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2008.137
• Keywords: Domain ontology; Ontology extraction; Text mining; Fuzzy sets; Concept map; eLearning