My experience:
A career spent working with photos, videos, music, and books has provided me ample opportunities to experiment with AI solutions for content tagging and metadata generation. From counting the number of people in a photo to applying keywords to kittens to writing fun facts about pop stars, AI-powered tools can perform a lot of mundane tasks. I’ve evaluated the work of these “robots” for over a decade, and I’ve recommended ways to leverage automation for scale, while still adhering to the level of quality demanded by human end users.
What we do at Scholastic:
At Scholastic, it is particularly important to ensure that the methods used to describe educational content satisfy the needs of teachers, parents, and students. In addition to tagging topics and keywords, we also need to tag content with national and state-governed subject-specific educational standards, as well as with skills or learning competencies.
Our focus:
Scholastic Education Solutions offers a wide range of digital products. The goal of the new platform is to provide a unified experience for users. There will be many types of content represented on the platform from magazine articles to quizzes to lesson plans to slideshows to books. This content will need to be consistently tagged with metadata including topics, skills, and educational standards.
The solutions we are deploying:
- A knowledge graph with a customized and evolving semantic layer will provide the foundation for the platform. To populate the graph, we are inserting AI technologies at multiple ingestion points to speed up the process of identifying topics, aligning content to educational standards, and ultimately, tagging content with topics, skills, and standards for retrieval.
- AI is helping us create a robust taxonomy for topics and skills and to identify potential relationships to formalize in our ontological properties, based on an analysis of the content itself and the connections uncovered in the process. AI is helping to recommend educational standards that align to our content, so we can reveal both strong matches and the more nuanced correlations.
By inserting humans-in-the-loop – editors and other subject matter experts – at the correct points in the flow, we can vet the AI-suggestions for accuracy and completeness and then confidently encourage users to explore the graph in the platform experience to discover Scholastic content serendipitously.