Towards the identification of propaedeutic relations in textbooks

As well-known, structuring knowledge and digital content has a tremendous potential to enhance meaningful learning. A straightforward approach is representing key concepts of the subject matter and organizing them in a knowledge structure by means of semantic relations. This results in hypergraphs with typed n-ary relationships, including the so-called prerequisite or propaedeutic relations among concepts. While extracting the whole concept graph from a textbook is our final goal, the focus of this paper is the identification of the propaedeutic relations among concepts. To this aim, we employ a method based on burst analysis and co-occurrence which recognizes, by means of temporal reasoning, prerequisite relations among concepts that share intense periods in the text. The experimental evaluation shows promising results for the extraction of propaedeutic relations without the support of external knowledge.