The slides present a method that combines the cognitive and socio-cultural paradigms for automatically identifying the most important moments (the so-called pivotal moments) from a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning chat. The existing applications do not identify these moments and we propose a flexible visual method for filling this gap. Since these moments may have different roles in a discourse, we also propose a classification of the identified types of important moments from chat conversations.

1. Autor Conducător științific
Universitatea
Politehnica
București
Facultatea de
Automatică și
Calculatoare
Catedra de
Calculatoare
Identification and Classification of the
Most Important Moments from
Students’ Collaborative Discourses
• Costin-Gabriel Chiru • Ştefan Trăuşan-MatuCostin-Gabriel CHIRU & Stefan TRAUSAN-MATU

2. Content
• Introduction
• Theoretical Ideas - Polyphony & Inter-animation
• The Application for the Identification and
Classification of the Most Important Moments
from a Chat
• Conclusions
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

3. Introduction
• Purpose? Develop a method and a visualization tool for analyzing
CSCL chats.
• Why? To identify and classify the most important moments from
chats.
• What for?
– Learners: supports a faster identification of answers to different
problems - areas from the chat where specific concepts are debated
and what solution has been chosen.
– Tutors: provides an overview of the understanding students have on
the topics debated in the chat and permits the identification of the
students’ differential positions relating these topics.
• How? Using a Polyphonic analysis.
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

4. Polyphony & Inter-animation
• Polyphony Theory was introduced by Bakhtin (1973) who
considered that in any text there are multiple voices that
influence each other  inter-animation of the ideas
presented by these voices.
• Voice = position taken by one or more of the participants
(central concept in Bakhtin’s work).
– Current implementations: a participant or an utterance.
– We considered that a voice = an idea, a concept that is
rhythmically repeated in the text.
• In CSCL the Polyphony Theory is used for modeling and
analyzing how knowledge is constructed in conversations
(Trausan-Matu, Stahl and Sarmiento, 2006, 2007; Trausan-
Matu, 2010).
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

5. Application’s interface
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

6. The Most Important Moments’
Identification
• Identification of voices: based on lexical chains (concept repetition)
- according to Brody (1994), a repetition is the echo of what has
been said and it provides a new context for the next uses of the
repeated concept.
• Following the repetition threads (the voices), one can see if they
are influencing each other (providing inter-animation) or not.
• Inter-animation = areas where different voices meet  the
important moments of the discourse  analyzing different voices
(chosen by the user), one can find the location of these moments
and can investigate the text in the file if needed.
• Used to analyze CSCL chats consisting of 4-8 participants debating
about which is the best tool for collaborative learning (chat, blog,
forum, wiki) (Trausan-Matu & Rebedea, 2010; Chiru et al., 2011).
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

7. The Most Important Moments’
Visualization
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
- Each “color” =
a different
voice from the
chat.
- Each “full dot”
= the area
where a voice
occurred in the
text.
-The position of
each “full dot”
= the
corresponding
location from
the text
(considering a
visualization
similar to the
one offered by
the text
editors)

8. The Most Important Moments’
Classification
• The important moments from a discourse – moments
where something happens due to the inter-animation
of different voices:
– all the voices die out;
– only a part of them die;
– the voices continue to be present in different areas;
– one voice substitutes the other;
– the voices flow in parallel, etc.
• 5 Different types of important moments: pivotal
moments (△), convergence moments (□), singular
moments (◊), divergence moments (∘) and meeting
points (threads of ∘).
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

9. Pivotal Moments ( )△
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
The most
important
type of
moments
since one
voice
replaces
the other

10. Convergence Moments ( )□
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
- Two or more
voices meet
and after that
all of them die
out.
- Possible
meaning of
resolving the
dissonances
that appear in
discourse, of
unifying the
voices.

11. Singular Moments (◊)
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
- Two or more
voices meet and
after that all of
them die out but
one.
- Possible
meaning: a
divergence
between
multiple voices,
that meet to
confront each
other; “the
loudest”
dissolving the
others.

12. Divergence Moments ( )∘
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
- Two or more voices
meet and after that
they continue to be
present in other
utterances from the
discourse.
- Possible meaning: a
fight between multiple
voices – with all the
voices strong enough so
that they cannot be
dissolved by the others.
After the fight every
voice continues its own
flow in the discourse.

13. Meeting Points (threads of )∘
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
- Two or more voices are
constantly debating during
the discourse. They meet in
several points and they
continue to be present and
to interact with each other
or with other voices, usually.
their flows being parallel.
- Possible meaning: multiple
voices that fit very well
together, either because
they are semantically related
but the link between them
has not been considered or
because they are
discourse related: idioms,
collocations, syntagms.
- Is in fact a chain of important moments.
- Meeting Points ≠ Chain of Divergence Points

14. Conclusions
• We have proposed a classification of the important moments of a
discourse and a visual method for their identification in discourse.
• We have built a flexible application, since the user has the
possibility to select what information he/she wants to be shown.
• We have explained how this application could be used for:
– the identification of the most important moments from a discourse,
– collocation identification,
– detection of missing links in the used lexical database.
• Other possible uses of this application are: how strong/focused
different voices are, which are the voices that can (or cannot) be
used in the same area of text, topic drifts identification or
polysemous words disambiguation.
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012

15. Questions
16.06.2012
Identification and Classification of the Most Important
Moments from Students’ Collaborative Discourses
ITS 2012
Thank you!