Natural Language Processing for Aligning Readings with Learning Objectives and Assessing Topic Balance in Dental Education

Abstract

Curriculum teams often lack time to check whether assigned readings support learning objectives (LOs) and whether topic coverage is balanced. We present a natural language processing (NLP) workflow to support evidence-informed curation of reading lists. The workflow combines PubMedBERT sentence embeddings and cosine similarity for retrieval, natural language inference (NLI) for evidence checking, and topic modeling for coverage analysis. We tested the approach in dental education using 13 course-level LOs and a PubMed-derived corpus of 3,837 LO-abstract pairs. Median cosine similarity ranged from 0.86 to 0.91 across the 13 LOs, showing generally high semantic similarity. Topic modeling showed broad but uneven coverage, with one or two dominant topics per domain. Similarity alone was not enough for selecting readings: among high-similarity pairs (cosine 0.90-1.00), 22.9% were classified by NLI as neutral or contradictory. In a 49-pair expert-labeled validation set, cosine-based retrieval (cosine >= 0.90) achieved 0.69 accuracy, while the combined cosine and NLI approach achieved 0.73 accuracy against expert alignment labels. Overall, the workflow shows how AI can support curriculum alignment by reducing false positives and helping select readings that better match intended LOs.