WERECE: An Unsupervised Method for Educational Concept Extraction Based on Word Embedding Refinement

Abstract

The era of educational big data has sparked growing interest in extracting and organizing educational concepts from massive amounts of information. Outcomes are of the utmost importance for artificial intelligence–empowered teaching and learning. Unsupervised educational concept extraction methods based on pre-trained models continue to proliferate due to ongoing advances in semantic representation. However, it remains challenging to directly apply pre-trained large language models to extract educational concepts; pre-trained models are built on extensive corpora and do not necessarily cover all subject-specific concepts. To address this gap, we propose a novel unsupervised method for educational concept extraction based on word embedding refinement (i.e., word embedding refinement–based educational concept extraction (WERECE)). It integrates a manifold learning algorithm to adapt a pre-trained model for extracting educational concepts while accounting for the geometric information in semantic computation. We further devise a discriminant function based on semantic clustering and Box–Cox transformation to enhance WERECE’s accuracy and reliability. We evaluate its performance on two newly constructed datasets, EDU-DT and EDUTECH-DT. Experimental results show that WERECE achieves an average precision up to 85.9%, recall up to 87.0%, and F1 scores up to 86.4%, which significantly outperforms baselines (TextRank, term frequency–inverse document frequency, isolation forest, K-means, and one-class support vector machine) on educational concept extraction. Notably, when WERECE is implemented with different parameter settings, its precision and recall sensitivity remain robust. WERECE also holds broad application prospects as a foundational technology, such as for building discipline-oriented knowledge graphs, enhancing learning assessment and feedback, predicting learning interests, and recommending learning resources.