Ask4Summary Automatically Responds Student’s Question with a Summary Assembled from Course Content

Abstract

This work-in-progress paper presents a Moodle plugin that parses a Moodle course’s text-based learning materials in various format (e.g., Microsoft Word DOCX file, Microsoft PowerPoint PPTX file, PDF file, web pages in HTML form) as well as a student’s question posted on a discussion forum on Moodle with Natural Language Processing techniques (e.g., ngram model) and search engine similarity calculation method (i.e., Cosine Similarity). The Ask4Summary acts like an online tutor can automatically answers a student’s question with a summary assembled via matching and retrieving from the stored information. The research team has also planned an evaluation on using the Ask4Summary in a graduate level academic writing in English course and explained its details at the end of this paper. Last but not the least, the Ask4Summary could be an online representative not only for online learning but is also capable of helping users on their questions regarding products, healthcare, etc. if there are correspondent text-based materials existing for Ask4Summary to read in advance.