Education-specific Tag Recommendation in CQA Systems

Systems for Community Question Answering (CQA) are well-known on the open web (e.g. Stack Overflow or Quora). They have been recently adopted also for use in educational domain (mostly in MOOCs) to mediate communication between students and teachers. As students are only novices in topics they learn about, they may need various scaffoldings to achieve effective question answering. In this work, we focus specifically on automatic recommendation of tags classifying students' questions. We propose a novel method that can automatically analyze a text of a question and suggest appropriate tags to an asker. The method takes specifics of educational domain into consideration by a two-step recommendation process in which tags reflecting course structure are recommended at first and consequently supplemented with additional related tags. Evaluation of the method on data from CS50 MOOC at Stack Exchange platform showed that the proposed method achieved higher performance in comparison with a baseline method (tag recommendation without taking educational specifics into account).