Dorinela Dascalu

Polytechnic University of Bucharest | UPB · Department of Computers

Dialogism is a philosophical theory centered on the idea that life involves a dialogue among multiple voices in a continuous exchange and interaction. Considering human language, different ideas or points of view take the form of voices, which spread throughout any discourse and influence it. From a computational point of view, voices can be operat...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the entire world, while the impact and usage of online learning environments has greatly increased. This paper presents a new version of the ReaderBench framework, grounded in Cohesion Network Analysis, which can be used to evaluate the online activity of students as a plug-in feature to Moodle. A Recurrent Neural...

Social media consists of interactive applications which bring together people from different geographical regions through technology. Online communities have become increasingly popular due to their capabilities to virtually connect people with similar interests. Based on their activity, a social rank is computed to measure how users are perceived...

Reading comprehension requires readers to connect ideas within and across texts to produce a coherent mental representation. One important factor in that complex process regards the cohesion of the document(s). Here, we tackle the challenge of providing researchers and practitioners with a tool to visualize text cohesion both within (intra) and bet...

Online collaborative learning environments open new research opportunities, for example, the analysis of learning outcomes, the identification of learning patterns, the prediction of students’ behaviors, and the modeling and visualization of social relations and trends among students. Moodle is an online educational platform which supports both stu...

Sentiment analysis and opinion summarization have become an important research area with the increase of available data on the Web. Since the Internet started containing more and more opinions and reviews for different products, individual users and companies saw the benefits of a priori evaluations based on other users’ experiences; thus, automate...

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments are frequently employed in various educational scenarios. At the same time, learning analytics tools are frequently used to quantify active learners’ participation, collaboration, and evolution over time in CSCL environments. The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel method to cluste...

Writing quality is an important component in defining students’ capabilities. However, providing comprehensive feedback to students about their writing is a cumbersome and time-consuming task that can dramatically impact the learning outcomes and learners’ performance. The aim of this paper is to introduce a fully automated method of generating ess...

Writing is a central skill needed for learning that is tightly linked to text comprehension. Good writing skills are gained through practice and are characterized by clear and organized language, accurate grammar usage, strong text cohesion, and sophisticated wording. Providing constructive feedback can help learners improve their writing; however,...

This study examines math success within a blended undergraduate course using a Cohesion Network Analysis (CNA) approach while controlling for individual differences and click-stream variables that may also predict math success. Linear models indicated that math success was related to days spent on the forum and by students who more regularly posted...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an important platform for teaching and learning because of their ability to deliver educational accessibility across time and distance. Online learning environments have also provided new research opportunities to examine learning success at a large scale. One data tool that has been proven effective...

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has gained a steadily increasing role as it helps students to better comprehend through its synergistic effect, mediated by technology. In line with CSCL learning paradigm, our approach is centered on creativity stimulation which is facilitated by a deeper understanding of the dialog. This paper intr...

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis are important research areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and have become viable alternatives for automatically extracting the affective information found in texts. Our aim is to build an NLP model to analyze gamers’ sentiments and opinions expressed in a corpus of 9750 game reviews. A Principal C...