Enriching learning materials with semantic roles

One of the most challenging tasks in human-computer communication is the decomposition of meaning. The theory of semantic frames allows for the identification of the roles that various constituents have in an event: the doer of the action, the receiver of the action, the person towards whom the action is directed, the means and purposes of an action, etc. Through this paper, we propose to introduce semantic frames in eLearning contexts, with the conviction that users may find it easier to learn concepts if they are offered in a semantically related manner. In order to achieve this, we propose a system that, for every concept searched by the user, offers a network of concepts, by analyzing the semantic relations which appear between concepts. In other words, the proposed system starts with a concept, retrieves sentences containing it from the collection of learning materials and identifies the semantic relations between the considered concept and the ones found in their neighborhood using semantic role labeling. Additional information is completed using DBpedia’s knowledge base before establishing the final network of relations.