An Improved Phrase-based Approach to Annotating and Summarizing Student Course Responses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel phrase-based summarization method for student responses that highlights key issues and their prevalence, improving the informativeness and relevance of summaries for large classes.

Contribution

It proposes a new phrase-based annotation and highlighting scheme, along with a metric for relevance, enhancing automatic summarization of student feedback.

Findings

The method produces more informative summaries as measured by ROUGE.

Summaries effectively highlight the most pressing student issues.

The approach enables prompt and relevant feedback for instructors.

Abstract

Teaching large classes remains a great challenge, primarily because it is difficult to attend to all the student needs in a timely manner. Automatic text summarization systems can be leveraged to summarize the student feedback, submitted immediately after each lecture, but it is left to be discovered what makes a good summary for student responses. In this work we explore a new methodology that effectively extracts summary phrases from the student responses. Each phrase is tagged with the number of students who raise the issue. The phrases are evaluated along two dimensions: with respect to text content, they should be informative and well-formed, measured by the ROUGE metric; additionally, they shall attend to the most pressing student needs, measured by a newly proposed metric. This work is enabled by a phrase-based annotation and highlighting scheme, which is new to the summarization task. The phrase-based framework allows us to summarize the student responses into a set of bullet points and present to the instructor promptly.