Automatic tagging of learning objects based on their usage in web portals

Data sets coming from the educational domain often suffer from sparsity. Hence, many learning objects are not accessible by the users as they are not able to find these objects using for example a text-based search. Furthermore, the lack of information makes it difficult or even impossible to recommend such hidden learning resources. In order to address the data sparsity problem, this paper presents a new way to enhance the objects' semantic representations. This is done by automatically assigning tags and classifications to learning objects offered by educational web portals. This way, we aim to increase the accessibility of the learning objects as well as to enable their recommendation. In contrast to popular tagging approaches that usually base the tagging of a learning object on its content or on the tags already assigned to it, the approach proposed in this paper is solely based on the objects' usage. Therefore, tags and classifications can be exchanged between the objects and also previously un-tagged objects that do not hold any textual content can be automatically assigned with tags and classifications.