Learning to Rank for Educational Search Engines

Date

2021-01-01

Author

Usta, Arif
Altıngövde, İsmail Sengör
Ozcan, Rifat
Ulusoy, Ozgur

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

102
views

0
downloads

In this digital age, there is an abundance of online educational materials in public and proprietary platforms. To allow effective retrieval of educational resources, it is a necessity to build keyword-based search engines over these collections. In modern web search engines, high quality rankings are obtained by applying machine learning techniques, known as Learning to Rank (LTR). In this paper, our focus is on constructing machine-learned ranking models to be employed in a search engine in the education domain. Our contributions are threefold. First, we identify and analyze a rich set of features (including click-based and domain-specific ones) to be employed in educational search. LTR models trained on these features outperform various baselines based on ad-hoc retrieval functions and two neural models. As our second contribution, we utilize domain knowledge to build query-dependent ranking models specialized for certain courses or education levels. Our experiments reveal that query-dependent models outperform both the general ranking model and other baselines. Finally, given well-known importance of user clicks in LTR, our third contribution is for handling singleton queries without any click information. To this end, we propose a new strategy to "propagate" click information from the other, similar, queries to the singleton queries. The proposed click propagation approach yields a better ranking performance than the general ranking model and another baseline from the literature. Overall, these findings reveal that both the general and query-dependent ranking models, trained using LTR approaches, yield high effectiveness in educational search, which may ultimately lead to a better learning experience.

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85105109644&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/90911

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1109/tlt.2021.3075196

Collections

Department of Computer Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Examining teaching presence, social presence, cognitive presence, satisfaction and learning in online and blended course contexts Akyol, Zehra; Özden, M. Yaşar; Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology (2009) Online and Blended learning are becoming widespread along with the changing needs of society and advances in technology. Recently, there is a growing emphasis on building learning communities in order to increase the effectiveness of these learning environments. In recent years there is one promising theory that has generated considerable interest and has been widely adopted and studied by researchers: the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000). The CoI framew...
Investigation of pre-service teachers’ mobile learning readiness levels and mobile learning acceptance levels İlçi, Ahmet; Yıldırım, Zahide; Yükseltürk, Erman; Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology (2014) Developments in information technologies have increased the use of mobile devices in the educational environments. The purpose of this study is to investigate mobile learning readiness level and mobile learning acceptance level of pre-service teachers in Faculty of Education in Middle East Technical University with respect to Unified Theory of Acceptance Model. Sequential explanatory mixed method research design was employed. Quantitative data for study were collected from 561 undergraduate students from se...
Students’ expectations from mobile devices for mobile learning Öztürk, Elif (2019-08-01) Mobile devices are becoming ever more widely available, with growing functionality, giving students access to educational material anytime and anywhere. Thus, mobile devices have become more attractive for education. However, owing to the nature of mobile devices, such as small screen size, it poses number of challenges to create a usable learning environment. Therefore, it becomes noteworthy to explore usability of these devices and the students' expectations. The present empirical study regarding the use ...
Supporting students’ scientific argumentation in technology-enhanced learning environments : distribution of scaffolds Üstünel, Hale Havva; Tokel, Saniye Tuğba; Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology (2013) Over the twenty years, researchers and practitioners have developed technology tools and designed technology-enhanced learning environments to support and teach argumentation. Relevantly, Kim et al. (2007) presented a pedagogical framework to provide a valid technology-enhanced learning environment. The purpose of this design-based study was to investigate micro context dimension of this framework and to analyze the interactions between student-tool, teacher-student, and teacher-tool. In this respect, in or...
Why young children use electronic media? maternal attitudes and competence Tatar, Burcu Halise; Kazak Berument, Sibel; Department of Psychology (2018) The Internet, technology, and electronic media tools have been becoming a central part of both adults and children’s lives. For this reason, the current study aimed to investigate the factors that related to young children’s electronic media use. A total of 165 mothers whose children attending a preschool were recruited, and mother’s parenting sense of competence, parental involvements, their attitudes toward children’s media use, and children’s temperamental characteristics were assessed. Results indicated...

Citation Formats

A. Usta, İ. S. Altıngövde, R. Ozcan, and O. Ulusoy, “Learning to Rank for Educational Search Engines,” IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, pp. 0–0, 2021, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85105109644&origin=inward.