Education/Newsletter/June 2016/Visualizations of relationships among knowledge? Try WikiSeeker!

Visualizations of relationships among knowledge? Try WikiSeeker!

By Liang (WMTW) and Tsung-Ho Liang (Tainan, Taiwan)

7th grade students using Wiki Seeker in a computer classroom

Snippet: Taiwanese researcher develop new ontology tool using Chinese Wikipedia to help primary and secondary school kids learn better

Dr. Tsung-Ho Liang (梁宗賀) is a systems analyst in the information center at the Tainan City Government's Bureau of Education. He is currently involved in studying big data in education, especially dealing with unstructured data and natural language processing techniques. In 2013, he started a project to integrate the contents of Chinese Wikipedia with the Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing (CKIP) technology and established a new search engine for Chinese Wikipedia – WikiSeeker (維基嬉客).

WikiSeeker is a tailor-made search system based on the Wikipedia corpus to leverage search effectiveness by providing structured association graphs with related Wikipedia articles (as a knowledge map form) for students' queries in Chinese. First, it produces a knowledge map with clear relationships among each field of knowledge, so students can easily identify the most important keywords among contents. Second, the search bar of WikiSeeker is capable of using natural language to search instead of typing keywords. You can see a tour of WikiSeeker on Youtube.

The above two features make WikiSeeker intuitive and easy to use for K-12 students. According to the research essay "WikiSeeker─The Study of the Impact of a Search System with Structured Association Graphs on Learning Effectiveness" by the researcher Sheng-Nan Cheng (鄭盛南), two experimental groups were adopted in this study: one asks students to use Chinese Wikipedia directly to answer questions, and another asks students use the WikiSeeker website to answer the same questions. The results showed that the students who used WikiSeeker were 10.8% more correct in their answers (on average, 13.73 out of 19, compared to 15.8 out of 19 questions). Moreover, it was found that female or middle-achieving students reached the highest learning improvement when using WikiSeeker. The conclusion suggests that WikiSeeker is suitable for students to acquire knowledge in Chinese Wikipedia.