Automatically assessing resource quality for educational digital libraries

Philipp Wetzler, Steven Bethard, Kirsten Butcher, James H. Martin, Tamara Sumner

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

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the rise of community-generated web content, the need for automatic assessment of resource quality has grown. We demonstrate how developing a concrete characterization of quality for web-based resources can make machine learning approaches to automating quality assessment in the realm of educational digital libraries tractable. Using data from several previous studies of quality, we gathered a set of key dimensions and indicators of quality that were commonly identified by educators. We then performed a mixed-method study of digital library quality experts, showing that our characterization of quality captured the subjective processes used by the experts when assessing resource quality. Using key indicators of quality selected from a statistical analysis of our expert study data, we developed a set of annotation guidelines and annotated a corpus of 1000 digital resources for the presence or absence of the key quality indicators. Agreement among annotators was high, and initial machine learning models trained from this corpus were able to identify some indicators of quality with as much as an 18% improvement over the baseline.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationWICOW'09 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web, Co-located with WWW 2009
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages3-10
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781605584881
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web, WICOW'09, in Conjunction with the 18th World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2009 - Madrid, Spain
Duration: Apr 20 2009Apr 20 2009

Publication series

NameWICOW'09 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web, Co-located with WWW 2009

Conference

Conference3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web, WICOW'09, in Conjunction with the 18th World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2009
Country/TerritorySpain
CityMadrid
Period4/20/094/20/09

Keywords

  • Digital library
  • Digital resource
  • Machine learning
  • Natural language processing
  • Quality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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