Measuring Prerequisite Relations Among Concepts

Chen Liang, Zhaohui Wu, Wenyi Huang, C. Lee Giles

Abstract: A prerequisite relation describes a basic relation among concepts in cognition, education and other areas. However, as a semantic relation, it has not been well studied in computational linguistics. We investigate the problem of measuring prerequisite relations among concepts and propose a simple link-based metric, namely reference distance (RefD), that effectively models the relation by measuring how differently two concepts refer to each other. Evaluations on two datasets that include seven domains show that our single metric based method outperforms existing supervised learning based methods.