Automatic concept extraction for learning domain modeling: A weakly supervised approach using contextualized word embeddings

AbstractHeterogeneity in student populations poses achallenge in formal education, with adaptivetextbooks offering a potential solution by tai-loring content based on individual learner mod-els. However, creating domain models for text-books typically demands significant manual ef-fort. Recent work by Chau et al. (2021) demon-strated automated concept extraction from dig-ital textbooks, but relied on costly domain-specific manual annotations. This paper in-troduces a novel, scalable method that mini-mizes manual effort by combining contextu-alized word embeddings with weakly super-vised machine learning. Our approach clustersword embeddings from textbooks and identi-fies domain-specific concepts using a machinelearner trained on concept seeds automaticallyextracted from Wikipedia. We evaluate thismethod using 28 economics textbooks, com-paring its performance against a tf-idf baseline,a supervised machine learning baseline, theRAKE keyword extraction method, and humandomain experts. Results demonstrate that ourweakly supervised method effectively balancesaccuracy with reduced annotation effort, offer-ing a practical solution for automated conceptextraction in adaptive learning environments.