Semantic Ranking of Lecture Slides based on Conceptual Relationship and Presentational Structure

We describe a presentation content retrieval method involving the semantic ranking of target slides based on the relations between slides related to a user query. This method uses a keyword conceptual structure of the conceptual relationship implicitly existing between keywords extracted from the slide text of the presentation content and the presentational structure of indents in the slide text. At present, many presentation files are shared over the Web by many universities through their own public sites. Although these files are useful and valuable to many potential students, the fact that such files have to be retrieved for self-learning purposes means that there is still a lack of support for self-learners to find the desired slides on a priority basis, i.e, on the basis of importance and urgency of requirement of the desired file. Our noble semantic ranking method helps a user to easily learn through slides, focusing on either highly detailed slides or introductory slides in an order related to the user query. We also present a prototype system supported by our method for slide ranking and evaluate its effectiveness through experiments. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.