Session Information
Paper Session
Contribution
The European Research Project “European Educational Research Quality Indicators” (EERQI) focuses on the development of innovative quality indicators to assess the quality of European educational research publications. As conventional instruments designed for quality assessment almost solely focus on citation analysis this project aims to explore different approaches to reach this goal. When looking at these efforts from the point of view of a provider of professional information the opportunities which can arise when using the outcomes of this research in subject databases are appealing.
The development of quality indicators within the EERQI project has been conducted in two directions. The terms ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ quality indicators have been coined to represent on the one hand the document qualities which are inherent to a text and constitute its quality and on the other hand characteristics of a document which are not an integral part of the document but correlate with highly qualitative texts such as bibliometric measures. The intrinsic quality criteria developed in expert discussions are rigour, originality, significance, integrity and style.
Another important feature of the EERQI project is its intended multilinguality. The EERQI database consists of documents of the four project languages English, French, German and Swedish. The document collection comprises publishers´ content as well as web documents from repositories, open access journals and other academic sources and has so far reached a size of more than 40,000 documents.
Along with the number of languages and documents goes the challenge of multilingual search and retrieval techniques. So far the implementation of the European Educational Thesaurus (EET)[1] enables a search in one language with documents in all four languages as results for those terms indexed. As an exploratory approach to achieve a better coverage of all terms of a topic area term networks in the four languages are constructed within the project. Instead of using a thesaurus or dictionary for the multilingual representation of the database content these intellectually constructed networks describe the hierarchical and synonymous relations between terms more precisely and comprehensive. The evaluation of the term networks for multilingual retrieval using the first five exemplary topic units will be conducted in spring 2010.
A rather innovative approach to quality assessment pursued in EERQI is the application of semantic text analysis to the educational research documents collected in the content base. The semantic text analyzer can identify sentences belonging to different rhetorical categories. With this methodology sentences which convey important messages in the text can be extracted e.g. summary sentences or problem statements. These sentences can be used for several purposes in peer review support (Sándor/Vorndran 2009), citation analysis (Åström/Sándor), automotive indexing or information retrieval. The latter application perspectives for professional information services will be outlined.
[1] To include the project language Swedish the somewhat outdated European Education Thesaurus had to serve as a first basis for multilingual search and retrieval because the more recent Thesaurus for Education Systems in Europe (TESE) does not contain this language.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Åström, F. & Sándor, Á., 2009. Models of Scholarly Communication and Citation Analysis. In Proceedings of ISSI 2009: The 12th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics: Volume 1. S. 10-21. Aϊt-Mokhtar, S., Chanod, J. & Roux, C., 2002. Robustness Beyond Shallowness: Incremental Deep Parsing. Natural Language Engineering, 8(2-3), 121-144. Sándor, Á. & Vorndran, A., 2009. Detecting key sentences for automatic assistance in peer reviewing research articles in educational sciences. In Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Text and Citation Analysis for Scholarly Digital Libraries, ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Suntec, Singapore. S. 36-44.
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