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Record W2025721211 · doi:10.1145/1562877.1563021

Towards automatic syllabi matching

2009· article· en· W2025721211 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicEducational Technology and Assessment
Canadian institutionsSheridan College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceSyllabusMatching (statistics)Artificial intelligenceMathematicsMathematics education

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Student mobility is a priority in the European Union since it not only allows academic interchange but also fosters the awareness of being a European citizen amongst students. The Bologna Process aimed at homogenizing the structure of the European Universities to facilitate the recognition of academic titles as foreseen by the Lisbon Recognition Convention and student mobility during their matriculation. Over one and a half million students have already benefited from mobility programs such as the Erasmus programme.Students that participate in a mobility program must consider a destination, a selection of courses to follow abroad and how their home institution will recognize their foreign credits. Selecting the most appropriate courses is not a simple task since a course title doesn't always reflect its content. As a result, manual inspection of syllabi is necessary. This makes the task time-consuming since it might require manual inspection and comparison of many syllabi from different institutions.It would be nice to be able to at least partially automate the process -- i.e. given a set of syllabi from two different universities, to be able to automatically find the best match among courses in the two institutions. We started experimenting with this possibility, and although we do not yet have final results we will present the main idea of our project.Our plan is to try to apply similarity matching algorithms to available documents. Similarity matching is often based on co-occurrence of common words. However, a naive application of such an algorithm would probably end up generating spurious similarities from the co-occurrence of general terms like hour, exercise, exam.... Using a stop-word strategy in which these words are catalogued and ignored might seem a viable solution, but generally does not significantly improve the results: words that may be considered irrelevant in one context might be important in a different context. The path we are following is to assume the existence of a reference ontology, where all terms have a description, and then try to identify the occurrence of the concepts existing in the ontology within the examined documents. In this way we will be able to state that syllabus x deals with topic y. The matching between different syllabi would then be calculated by matching the topics that were associated with the syllabi.We decided to focus on the Computer Science domain since the domain has already been classified into areas, units and topics present in CC2001[1] and this ontology has already been mapped into XML structures[2]. We then used a similarity matching algorithm that uses Wikipedia as a reference corpus[3]. Although preliminary results are not yet fully satisfactory, we believe that this might result from working at the word level rather than at a concept level; is not just the co-occurrence of software and engineering but a more complex concept. We are therefore currently exploring the possibility of identifying multi-words as concepts (still by using Wikipedia as a reference to decide if this is the case or not).If our attempts are successful, the next step will be to (semi-)automatically crawl academic sites to identify curricula and automatically match them by using our algorithm.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.661
Threshold uncertainty score0.145

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.300
Teacher spread0.288 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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