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…

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)

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…