Mining the Web for Customized Curriculum Planning

Language Technologies for Education

With massive quantities of educational materials freely available on the web, the vision of universal education appears within our grasp. The project focuses on: 1) extracting educational units from diverse web sites and representing them in a large directed graph, whose nodes are content descriptors and whose edges encode pre-requisite and other relations, 2) conducting multi-field topic inference via a new family of graphical models to infer relations among educational units, enriching the graph, and 3) automated curricular planning, focusing on providing sequences of lessons, courses, exercises and other education units for a student to achieve his or her educational goals, conditioned on current skills.