Analysis of concept sequencing in student drafts

Abstract

The proposal draft is the first step to achieve a university degree by students in many educational institutions. This proposal is transformed into a thesis after several revisions by an academic adviser. Each proposal must comply with requirements of institutional guidelines. In this paper we present an analyzer to identify the sequence of concepts within the proposal drafts in Computer Science and Information Technologies, with the goal of aiding students to improve their drafting. We propose four methods integrated into our analyzer, which were designed considering the transitions of grammar constituents (subject and object) in the sections of Problem Statement, Justification and Conclusions. We developed the methods from corpora analysis, validating them further. Moreover, we found that the sequences of concepts correspond to what is expected in the different sections. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.