the most significant topics and associated tools ... Students are required to develop an application based on a working information ... The first passage on the course content is designed as a rapid application development experiment,.
HOW TO TEACH ADVANCED COURSES IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY AREAS? António Teixeira1,3, Mário Rodrigues2,3, Miguel O. Silva1,3 1DETI, University of Aveiro (PORTUGAL) 2ESTGA, University of Aveiro (PORTUGAL) 3IEEETA, University of Aveiro (PORTUGAL)
The problem(s) • Advanced courses at graduated level dedicated to technological problems often require multidisciplinary knowledge and, in areas such as Computer Science and Informatics, may require learning skills to correctly handle many software tools. • Moreover, the topics covered can be recent, developing fast and yet not covered in previous courses.
• A major problem to address when planning this type of courses is how to provide an overview covering most of the area while covering all topics with appropriate depth. • In the area of informatics, a tangible formulation of this objective is how to assure that students have a comprehensive view of the area and at the same time are able to produce useful applications in the end of the course. EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Our proposal • Our approach involves a double passage over the course content, and a balanced combination of practical assignment(s) with expositive parts. • The first passage is quick, taking typically a class of 3 to 4 hours, and provides an overview of the area. • This overview is supported by hands on tutorials designed to provide experimentation of the most significant topics and associated tools • Tutorials are based on toy applications with real data and, as much as possible, avoid the application of skills not directly involved in the course content.
• The second passage lasts the rest of the course, or almost, and each class preferably focuses on one topic. • Alongside activities specific to class topics, the second passage is supported by practical assignment(s) integrating most, if not all, the course content. • Therefore, the assignments are developed throughout the course and in synchrony with the topics covered in classes. EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Use Case 1 – Advanced Information Extraction • Advanced Information Extraction is an optional course of a doctoral program in Informatics dedicated to studying how to process from documents containing natural language texts in order to obtain granular information that is machine processable, reusable, and desirably have a semantic associated to it. • Main target are documents without a formal data structure, such as XML markup.
• Extracting information from natural language unstructured documents is becoming more and more relevant in our society where “Documents have become the glue that enables societies to cohere. Documents have increasingly become the means for monitoring, influencing, and negotiating relationships with others” . • Students are required to develop an application based on a working information extraction pipeline built by them. It is students’ responsibility to select and adapt the necessary modules from the many available in the field. The application is developed throughout the course and is presented in the last class. • The first passage on the course content is designed as a rapid application development experiment, taking typically a class of 4 hours and providing an overview of the area.
• First are presented the advantages of acquiring structured and granular data from natural language sources, the challenges of processing natural languages, and the generic architecture of current information extraction systems • After is presented to the students a tutorial regarding the development of a toy application, its key steps and the expected output. Students start the tutorial in class and are expected to end it as homework.
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Use Case 1 (cont.) • The second passage is organized in the following way:
• Morphosyntactic analysis • Covering determination of syntactic elements and structures: verbs, nouns, phrases and their dependencies.
• Identifying entities and relations • Based on the morphosyntactic analysis of the content, the goal is to identify the entities mentioned in documents and the relations they participate in. This stage of processing is domain dependent since the type of entities and relation to detect depends on the application: an application about movies requires a different set of entities and relations than an application about culinary.
• Semantic and knowledge representation • After having identifying granular data such as entities and respective relations, it is necessary to define how to represent and store such information. In this context, is explained and showed what are taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies. It is also explained some key resources such as WordNet and key languages and tools for information representation and storage such as Web Ontology Language (OWL), triple stores, and Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL).
• Ontology based information extraction (OBIE) • The course ends with OBIE which is a way of using the expressive power of ontologies to improve the information extraction process. Most current implementations of information extraction use some kind of OBIE. EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Results - Advanced Information Extraction • This course had only one edition • Evaluation can be done based on the final grades and the quality of the developed systems. • The median grade, in 0 to 20 scale, for the 11 students assessed was 17 (average of 16) • with 2 students reaching excellent results (and a grade of 19).
• All practical assignments resulted in useful working processing pipelines fulfilling essential requirements in IE, namely entity recognition; • Most of the systems were able to fulfill all requirements, being capable of extracting entities and relations, store them in a semantic knowledge base and answer to complex semantic queries in SPARQL. • The course had a mix of students’ nationalities which resulted in practical systems developed for extracting information from text of different languages (Portuguese, English, Persian/Farsi and Kazakh). EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Example of Students’ practical assignement • Theme: Advanced Information Extraction from News Articles
• Objective:
• Extract information on Events related to Weather-related phenomena (ex. floods), fires and explosions (both natural forest fires and bomb attacks), and attacks (military or terrorist-related)
• News articles were extracted from popular Portuguese news website AIEOU using a custom-built crawler. • Developed pipeline:
EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
(cont.) • Example of Results (in portuguese)
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Use Case 2 – Multimodal Interaction • Optional course in the last year of Master degrees in Informatics/Computer Science. • Objectives: 1. Complement previous Human Computer Interaction courses; 2. 2Overview of recent developments in multimodal interaction and its latest support technologies; 3. Hands-on experience in the design and implementation of multimodal systems.
• Based on a continuous type evaluation, consisting of practical projects, small reports and presentations. • Program organized into two parts:
Fundamentals & Overview of the area
Modalities
Combination of Modalities & Interaction Management
1. Overview of the area, covering from basic concepts to demonstration of complete systems (gray background in the figure; 2. In depth passage by the concepts and support technologies of the selected modalities, how to combine and use them, and, to conclude, provide application examples. EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Applications
Results - Multimodal Interaction • The Grades obtained by the students (0 to 20), the median value of 16 with most of the values between 15 and 17, clearly shows that the method adopted made possible the students learn the basics of the several topics and use them to develop quite interesting interaction prototypes. • Course results support our position that is possible to successfully apply our approach to the area of multimodal interaction. EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Results (2) • Results of University of Aveiro Quality evaluation for Multimodal Interaction Course. Scores are from a minimum of 1 to a maximum 9. Evaluation Criteria Student motivation for course Global satisfaction with course Adequacy of the activities to the course objectives Adequacy of evaluation method Development of capabilities to understand the topics Articulation of course activities Global functioning of course Degree of difficulty of the contents Amount of work needed
Mean (max=9) 7,2 7,1 7,4 7,4 6,7 6,2 7,1 5,5 5,9
• In general, evaluation obtained exceeds 7 (at least 15 if we normalize the scale to 0-20), a classification that we can consider good/very good.
• The lower values (below 6) are also positive as they refer to the perceived difficulty and the amount of work needed to be approved in the course, being aligned with the objectives of the course EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Example of Students’ practical assignment Scenario Control Google Maps by speech and gestures
Conclusion • A method for course planning and teaching was presented aiming at handling the special needs of courses addressing large fast developing areas and involving the need to acquire multidisciplinary and broad band concepts without compromising a main aim of making possible students to develop practical applications using state-of-the-art technologies and processes • The results of its application to two post-graduate courses in Informatics were presented • The results obtained, particularly the fact that all students, in both courses, managed to create working systems with a high degree of complexity and fulfilling the essential of the requirements for the practical assignments, show the potential of the proposed method of course organization for courses with such a large number of new concepts and tools to learn and apply. • Future work:
• More in depth evaluation of the outcomes of the two courses • Systematization of the key requirements for a course to be a good candidate for application of the method proposed EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
ACKNOWLEGMENTS
• The work presented has been partially funded by IEETA Research Unit funding (Incentivo/EEI/UI0127/2014) and Marie Curie IAPP project IRIS (ref. 610986, FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IAPP).
EduLearn 2016: DETI / ESTGA / IEETA, University of Aveiro, Portugal
