Educational Data Mining is an emerging discipline which seeks to develop methods to explore large amounts of data from educational settings, in order to understand students' behavior, interests and results in a better way. In recent years there have been various works related to this specialty and multiple data mining techniques derived from this…

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was…

Considers how the order of documents in information retrieval responses are determined and introduces a method that uses a probabilistic model of a document set where documents are regarded as states of a Markov chain and where transition probabilities are directly proportional to similarities between documents. (Author/LRW)

This study proposes a probabilistic model for automatically extracting English noun phrases for indexing or information retrieval. The technique is based on a Markov model, whose initial parameters are estimated by a phrase lookup program with a phrase dictionary, then optimized by a set of maximum entropy parameters. (Author/LRW)

Discusses users' search behavior and decision making in data mining and information retrieval. Describes iterative information seeking as a Markov process during which users advance through states of nodes; and explains how the information system records the decision as weights, allowing the incorporation of users' decisions into the Markov…