Process Mining to Support Students' Collaborative Writing

Writing, particularly collaborative writing is a commonly needed skill. Investigating how ideas and concepts are developed during the process of writing can be used to improve not only the quality of the written documents but more importantly the writing skills of those involved. In this paper, process mining is used to analyze the process that groups of writers follow, and how the process correlates to the quality and semantic features of the final product. Particularly, we developed heuristics to extract the semantic nature of text changes during writing. These semantic changes were then used to identify writing activities in writing processes. We conducted a pilot study using documents collected from groups of undergraduate students writing collaboratively in order to evaluate the proposed heuristics and illustrate the applicability of process mining techniques in analyzing the process of writing.