An intelligent concept map for e-book via automatic keyword extraction

Abstract

The advance of internet technologies and digital information systems has played a critical role in the development of modern education. In particular, several innovative information technologies and products have witnessed the changes of learning behaviors in recent years. Among them, how to use e-books to improve the learning performance of audience has become a promising research topic because it can be used to automatically record the reading behaviors of audience. In this way, we can provide personalized information to the audience. Generally speaking, an e-book can typically be regarded as a product of a book after it is digitized, because modern information technologies make it possible for an e-book abundant in multimedia contents than does a textbook. In Taiwan, the ministry of education encourages instructors to try new teaching methods, strategies, devices, and even environments to enhance the learning motivation of students. Using handheld devices, mobile applications, and e-books to support the learning of elementary students has become a popular research topic. In this study, we will present a novel e-book system that integrates two different technologies to enhance the learning performance of an e-book, which are: (1) information retrieval to understand the contents to the e-book system, and (2) concept map to provide knowledge to the audience. Before building a concept map, the proposed system has to extract the keywords from the e-book and to understand their relationships. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a sixth grade class of 61 students in Taiwan are used as a test. In this study, all of the students, never learned these materials before, are divided into two groups. Experimental results show that the proposed e-book system with keyword concept map can significantly improve the learning performance of students compared to the traditional e-book in terms of both the scores received after learning and the results of satisfaction questionnaire on learning, practising, and system satisfaction.