Automatic Extraction of Nonlinguistic Representations of Texts to Support Writing

Eliseo Reategui^1, and Daniel Epstein¹

¹PGIE, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Cite this paper

Eliseo Reategui and Daniel Epstein. Automatic Extraction of Nonlinguistic Representations of Texts to Support Writing. American Journal of Educational Research. 2015; 3(12):1592-1596. doi: 10.12691/EDUCATION-3-12-16

Abstract

Graphic organizers may be a helpful instrument in assisting students to structure their text productions. This paper presents a mining tool that is able to extract relevant terms and relationships from texts and shows how the tool may be used to help students in writing summaries. A particular tool is presented, explaining the technique used to analyze the texts, to extract relevant terms and build graphs from them. These graphs are then used by students as graphic organizers, helping them to reflect about the main ideas of the text before the actual writing task. Two experiments are presented in this paper, in which a total of 29 students were asked to read and summarize a short text with the assistance of the text mining tool. Results demonstrated that the tool helped students reflect about the main ideas of the text and supported the actual writing of the summaries.

Keywords

summarization, writing, text mining, graphic organizers

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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