Enriching Textbooks Through Data Mining

  • Rakesh Agrawal ,
  • Sreenivas Gollapudi ,
  • Krishnaram Kenthapadi ,
  • Nitish Srivastava ,
  • Raja Velu

ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV) |

Published by ACM

Textbooks play an important role in any educational system. Unfortunately, many textbooks produced in developing countries are not written well and they often lack adequate coverage of important concepts. We propose a technological solution to address this problem based on enriching textbooks with authoritative web content. We augment textbooks at the section level for key concepts discussed in the section. We use ideas from data mining for identifying the concepts that need augmentation as well as to determine the links to the authoritative content that should be used for augmentation. Our evaluation, employing textbooks from India, shows that we are able to enrich textbooks on different subjects and across different grades with high quality augmentations using automated techniques.