PreFace++: Faceted Retrieval of Prerequisites and Technical Data

Abstract

While learning new technical material, a user faces difficulty encountering new concepts for which she does not have the necessary prerequisite knowledge. Determining the right set of prerequisites is challenging because it involves multiple searches on the web. Although a number of techniques have been proposed to retrieve prerequisites, none of them consider grouping prerequisites into interesting facets. To address this issue, we have developed a system called PreFace++ (http://eval_teknowbase_for_ir.apps.iitd.ac.in/prerequisites/) which assists a user in learning new topics. PreFace++ is an extension of our previous system PreFace. It takes a query as input and returns (i) a prerequisite graph, where the nodes represent prerequisites for the query and edges indicate prerequisite relationship, ii) a set of interesting facets towards understanding the query (iii) prerequisites for the query and the facet and iv) a set of research papers and posts relevant for the query and the facet to explore relationship between the query and the facet. The backbone of PreFace++ is TeKnowbase, which is a knowledge base in Computer Science.