Automatic Extraction of Conceptual Maps from Design Team Documents Sharad Oberoi, Dong Nguyen, Susan Finger and Carolyn Rosé Carnegie Mellon University

Collaborative learning in design Goals Develop an infrastructure that supports effective knowledge management for student design teams Assist members of design teams to build and retain knowledge created through discussions, project documents and sharing of artifacts DETC2010-29115

Common Issues in Design Teams Knowledge sharing Information retrieval DETC2010-29115

Background Concept Mapping in Design Education Scientometrics Group memory systems Topic Modeling DETC2010-29115

Capturing in-process data We have 6 years of data from project classes that used the Kiva for team collaboration Combines functions of e-mail, bboards and chat Each year’s Kiva has hundreds of threads and thousands of posts and files DETC2010-29115

Capturing in-process data DETC2010-29115

Approach DesignWebs synthesize the design knowledge from multiple sources of information used by students during a design project enable users to see connections between the concepts used in an artifact at different levels can reveal the current state of the project and the underlying structure of the design DETC2010-29115

Approach Seed the DesignWeb with research papers Extract the LDA model and apply hierarchical clustering to extract a hierarchical topic structure Calculate connections between topics and terms Make relevant documents accessible Generate the web-based navigable DesignWebs DETC2010-29115

DesignWebs Scenario Civil Engineering Junior Projects Class One year, a student team worked on stormwater management solutions to address drainage issues in sections of the parking area on campus They performed site analysis, evaluated alternative solutions and made recommendations and made full schematic designs Next year, a new team of students took on the project of water recycling to prevent stormwater discharge from mixing with the city sewer system. DETC2010-29115

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Challenges Segment resolution Levels of abstraction Students are novices in technical writing Alternate views for different users Credibility of source Identifying the structure of created knowledge, especially for different versions of the same document DETC2010-29115

Research Questions Can we automatically extract the concept maps of a design artifact from the group conversation and documents for ongoing and archived project corpuses? Can we automatically detect the inception and connectivity of key ideas in groups at various project milestones? Can we identify evidence of favorable design performance for a group from the vocabulary used in its conversations and documentation? DETC2010-29115

Questions? Thank you for your time, and I would be happy to take any questions at this time. DETC2010-29115