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<Paper uid="H05-2003">
  <Title>Introducing Discussion Summarization to Online Classrooms</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="4" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The availability of many chat forums reflects the formation of globally dispersed virtual communities, one of which is the very active and growing movement of Open Source Software (OSS) development. Working together in a virtual community in non-collocated environments, OSS developers communicate and collaborate using a wide range of web-based tools including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), electronic mailing lists, and more.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Another similarly active virtual community is the distributed education community. Whether courses are held entirely online or mostly oncampus, online asynchronous discussion boards play an increasingly important role, enabling classroom-like communication and collaboration amongst students, tutors and instructors. The University of Southern California, like many other universities, employs a commercial online course management system (CMS). In an effort to bridge research and practice in education, researchers at ISI replaced the native CMS discussion board with an open source board that is currently used by selected classes. The board provides a platform for evaluating new teaching and learning technologies.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Within the discussion board teachers and students post messages about course-related topics. The discussions are organized chronologically within topics and higher-level forums. These 'live' discussions are now enabling a new opportunity, the opportunity to apply and evaluate advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Recently we designed a summarization system for technical chats and emails on the Linux kernel (Zhou and Hovy, 2005). It clusters discussions according to subtopic structures on the sub-message level, identifies immediate responding pairs using machine-learning methods, and generates subtopic-based mini-summaries for each chat log. Incorporation of this system into the ISI Discussion Board framework, called Classummary, benefits both distance learning and NLP communities. Summaries are created periodically and sent to students and teachers via their preferred medium (emails, text messages on mobiles, web, etc). This relieves users of the burden of reading through a large volume of messages before participating in a particular discussion. It also enables users to keep track of all ongoing discussions without much effort. At the same time, the discussion summarization system can be measured beyond the typical NLP evalua- null tion methodologies, i.e. measures on content coverage. Teachers and students' willingness and continuing interest in using the software will be a concrete acknowledgement and vindication of such research-based NLP tools. We anticipate a highly informative survey to be returned by users at the end of the service.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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