Using text-mining to support the evaluation of texts produced collaboratively

Abstract

This paper presents a collaborative writing system which has been conceived to be used by teachers as a collaborative learning tool in distance learning courses. Besides enabling students to communicate with each other and elaborate a text in a collaborative way, the system has an embedded text mining tool to enable teachers to extract graphs from student's writings. The graphs give teachers a concise view of the students' works by showing important concepts that appear in the texts. An extension course was organized in order to provide an initial validation for the collaborative writing tool. The experiments carried out during the course demonstrated the potential of text mining for the analysis of students' work. The experiments carried out as well as their results are presented here, followed by conclusions and suggestions for future work. © 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.