Explanation Mining

Explanations are used to provide an understanding of a concept, procedure, or reasoning to others. Although explanations are present online ubiquitously within textbooks, discussion forums, and many more, there is no way to mine them automatically to assist learners in seeking an explanation. To address this problem, we propose the task of Explanation Mining. To mine explanations of educational concepts, we propose a baseline approach based on the Language Modeling approach of information retrieval. Preliminary results suggest that incorporating knowledge from a model trained on the ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five) dataset in the form of a document prior helps increase the performance of a standard retrieval model. This is encouraging because our method requires minimal in-domain supervision, as a result, it can be deployed for multiple online courses. We also suggest some interesting future work in the computational analysis of explanations.