Effective human learning depends on a wide selection of educational materials that align with the learner’s current understanding of the topic. While the Internet has revolutionized human learning or education, a substantial resource accessibility barrier still exists. Namely, the excess of online information can make it challenging to navigate and discover high-quality learning materials in a given subject area. In this paper, we propose an automatic pipeline for building an educational resource discovery system for new domains. The pipeline consists of three main steps: resource searching, feature extraction, and resource classification. We first collect frequent queries from a set of seed documents, and search the web with these queries to obtain candidate resources such as lecture slides and introductory blog posts. Then, we process these resources for BERT-based features and meta-features. Next, we train a tree-based classifier to decide whether they are suitable learning materials. The pipeline achieves F1 scores of 0.94 and 0.82 when evaluated on two similar but novel domains. Finally, we demonstrate how this pipeline can benefit two applications: prerequisite chain learning and leading paragraph generation for surveys. We also release a corpus of 39,728 manually labeled web resources and 659 queries from NLP, Computer Vision (CV), and Statistics (STATS).

Learning prerequisite chains is an important task for one to pick up knowledge efficiently in both known and unknown domains. For example, one may be an expert in the natural language processing (NLP) domain, but want to determine the best order in which to learn new concepts in an unfamiliar Computer Vision domain (CV). Both domains share some common concepts, such as machine learning basics and deep learning models. In this paper, we solve the task of unsupervised cross-domain concept prerequisite chain learning, using an optimized variational graph autoencoder. Our model learns to transfer concept prerequisite relations from an information-rich domain (source domain) to an information-poor domain (target domain), substantially surpassing other baseline models. In addition, we expand an existing dataset by introducing two new domains—-CV and Bioinformatics (BIO). The annotated data and resources as well as the code will be made publicly available.