With the increased popularity of electronic textbooks, there is a growing interest in developing a new generation of "intelligent textbooks," which have the ability to guide readers according to their learning goals and current knowledge. Intelligent textbooks extend regular textbooks by integrating machine-manipulable knowledge, and the…

Discussion forums in learning management systems (LMS) have been shown to promote student interaction and contribute to the collaborative practice in the teaching-learning process. By evaluating the postings, teachers can identify students with learning difficulties. However, due to the large volume of posts that are generated on a daily basis in…

The number of e-learning platforms and blended learning environments is continuously increasing and has sparked a lot of research around improvements of educational processes. Here, the ability to accurately predict student performance plays a vital role. Previous studies commonly focused on the construction of predictors tailored to a formal…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

In this thesis, we study the importance of background knowledge in relation extraction systems. We not only demonstrate the benefits of leveraging background knowledge to improve the systems' performance but also propose a principled framework that allows one to effectively incorporate knowledge into statistical machine learning models for…

Social media provide a multitude of opportunities for knowledge contribution and sharing. However, the content reliability issue has caused comprehensive attention, especially on credible social media, such as Wikipedia. Despite Wikipedia's success with the open editing model, dissenting voices give rise to unreliable content due to two…

The concept of learning objects has been applied in the e-learning field to promote the accessibility, reusability, and interoperability of learning content. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) was developed to achieve these goals by describing learning objects in order to provide meaningful metadata. Unfortunately, the conventional LOM lacks the…

This thesis work is mainly focused on two problems related to improving accessibility of information graphics for visually impaired users. The first problem is automated analysis of information graphics for information extraction and the second problem is multi-modal representations for accessibility. Information graphics are graphical…

This article provides an empirical evaluation of an indexing technology, topic maps (ISO 13250), in the context of an academic task in a higher education context. Topic maps are a form of indexing that define and display the interrelationships between various topics in a given domain, as well as anchor these topics to specific resources that help…

The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this explosion of information are needed. While it is only possible to read one paper or…