Approach to Educational Course Comparison Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

Abstract

As numbers of educational programmes and courses grow, the need for a method of comparison becomes apparent. In this paper we discuss the overall state of education data mining, the variety of document types and formats used for educational content and propose the combined similarity measure for educational course programmes, Our proposed similarity measure uses three most important in our opinion elements of course programmes – course descriptions, educational results of the course and the structure of the educational course. We describe our approach to calculate similarity for each of this component pairs as well as provide primary experimental results and their evaluation using mean average precision metric.