Modeling the process of online q&a discussions using a dialogue state model

Abstract

Online discussion board has become increasingly popular in higher education. As a step towards analyzing the role that students and instructors play during the discussion process and assessing students' learning from discussions, we model different types of contributions made by instructors and students with a dialogue-state model. By analyzing frequent Q&A discussion patterns, we have developed a graphic model of dialogue states that captures the information role that each message plays, and used the model in analyzing student discussions, presenting several viable ap-proaches including CRF, SVM, and decision tree for the state classification. Such analyses can give us a new insight on how students interact in online discussions and kind of assistance needed by the students. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.