Assisting undergraduate students in writing Spanish methodology sections

Samuel González-López, Steven Bethard, Aurelio López-López

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

In undergraduate theses, a good methodology section should describe the series of steps that were followed in performing the research. To assist students in this task, we develop machine-learning models and an app that uses them to provide feedback while students write. We construct an annotated corpus that identifies sentences representing methodological steps and labels when a methodology contains a logical sequence of such steps. We train machine-learning models based on language modeling and lexical features that can identify sentences representing methodological steps with 0.939 f-measure, and identify methodology sections containing a logical sequence of steps with an accuracy of 87%. We incorporate these models into a Microsoft Office Addin, and show that students who improved their methodologies according to the model feedback received better grades on their methodologies.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2020 - Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Proceedings of the 15th Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages115-123
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148187
StatePublished - 2020
Event15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2020 at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Jul 10 2020 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2020 at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/10/20 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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