Question Retrieval based on Community Question Answering: Baseline Selection among Retrieval Models on two Datasets

Community question answering (CQA) platforms provide a social environment for users to share knowledge online. Users can submit complex and subjective questions on CQA platforms and then derive the desired answer from other community users. A large number of user-generated data has been produced by various CQA sites (e.g., Quora, StackExchange)...

MANtIS: a novel information seeking dialogues dataset

Nowadays, most users access the web through search engine portals. However, information needs can often be ill-defined or too broad to be solvable by a list of results the user has to scroll through, which implies that he is most likely required to refine the need by himself to reach the desired result. In recent years, researchers have...

Word Embedding Models for Query Expansion in Answer Passage Retrieval

With the increasing popularity of mobile and voice-assisted, extracting short and precise answer passages to open-domain questions is becoming an increasingly important information retrieval (IR) task. The recently released large-scale corpus for answer passage retrieval—WikiPassageQA—was shown to be challenging for both traditional retrieval...

Axiomatic Thinking in Neural IR: An axiomatic approach to diagnosing deep IR models

After surpassing human performance in the fields of Computer Vision, Speech Recognition and NLP, deep learning has been gaining scientific ground in IR. In spite of the sheer amount of publications that have proposed so-called neural IR approaches over the past decade, the field has not achieved the kind of progress seen in related fields. Over...

It's time for some Alexercise: A comparison between reflection capabilities of activity trackers and intelligent personal assistants

Recently published health reports from governments of western countries and the World Health Organization (WHO) provide insights on health benefits of being physically active. Performing physical activity of moderate intensity is, amongst others, associated with a smaller risk on symptoms of depression, cardiovascular disease and diabetes....

The Real-Time Learning Tracker: Real-Time Learner Feedback for Encouraging Self-Regulation & Metacognition in MOOCS

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to make quality education affordable and available to the masses and reduce the gap between the most privileged and the most disadvantaged learners worldwide. However, this potential is overshadowed by low completion rates, often below 15%. Due to the high level of autonomy that is required...

Evaluating Collaborative Search for a Learning-Oriented Search Task

Web search has become a convenient option for seeking information related to learning, therefore understanding how to facilitate human learning through a search engine has the potential to improve the quality of informal education and online learning. One less understood aspect of search as learning is the effect of collaboration in a search...

Gamified Campus Engagement

Gamification is the process of integrating game mechanics into non-game contexts - a website, an application, an online community - to motivate par- ticipation and engagement. Several studies have highlighted the benefits of gamification in several applications. However, its potential benefits in the campus environment still need to be...

Building a workbench to improve sharing and reproducibility of MOOC experiments

This thesis improves sharing of code and reproducibility (S&R) in research for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Reproducibility is recreating an experiment by a different researcher. Science in general struggles with repro- ducibility. MOOC experiments often contain useful code that could be used by other researchers, but that code is...

Data Analytics in Web-based Education in the Higher-education Classroom

Attention span of students in a classroom is very short. To overcome this, different active learning methodologies have been used in the past. Active learning keeps the students busy and engaged throughout the lecture. It breaks the lecture into certain time intervals by intermixing breaks, demonstrations and questions after each interval. For...

UrbanSearch Project

EGA Membership Card System

The E-Sports Game Arena will launch an esports cafe in the summer of 2017. At this location, the company wants to introduce membership cards to create a sense of community. The goal of the project was to explore the technological possibilities of such cards and to create a working prototype that makes use of these possibilities.<br/> <br/>At the...

Question classification according to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

FeedbackFruits is a company that provides tools for educators to organize their courses. The company is currently working on aiding teachers in aligning course material and assessment. Aligning the two provides students with clear expectations and can lead to an increase in learning [1]. Aligning course material and assessment is usually done by...