Development of curriculum design support system based on word embedding and terminology extraction

The principles of computer skills have been included in primary and secondary educated since the early 2000s, and the reform of curricula is related to the development of IT. Therefore, curricula should reflect the latest technological trends and needs of society. The development of a curriculum involves the subjective judgment of a few experts or professors to extract knowledge from several similar documents. More objective extraction needs to be based on standardized terminology, and professional terminology can help build content frames for organizing curricula. The purpose of this study is to develop a smart system for extracting terms from the body of computer science (CS) knowledge and organizing knowledge areas. The extracted terms are composed of semantically similar knowledge areas, using the word2vec model. We analyzed a higher-education CS standards document and compiled a dictionary of technical terms with a hierarchical clustering structure. Based on the developed terminology dictionary, a specialized system is proposed to enhance the efficiency and objectivity of terminology extraction. The analysis of high school education courses in India and Israel using the technical term extraction system found that 1) technical terms for Software Development Fundamentals were extracted at a high rate in entry-level courses, 2) in advanced courses, the ratio of technical terms in the areas of Architecture and Organization, Programming Languages, and Software Engineering areas was high, and 3) electives that deal with advanced content had a high percentage of technical terms related to information systems.