Cite or Decline: A Strict Course-Grounded Chatbot for STEM Lecture Videos

Generating high-quality, pedagogically useful questions from lecture slide decks is difficult because important instructional content is distributed across both text and visual elements, and because useful questions must be scaffolded across the flow of a presentation rather than generated slide by slide in isolation. This paper describes Slide Deck Q&A Quality Assurance (slidesqaqa), a Flask-based software system that extracts text and rendered images from PDF slides and processes them through a four-stage large language model pipeline comprising window planning, deck synthesis, slide annotation, and reconciliation. The system reasons jointly about slide modality and pedagogical role, allocates bounded question budgets, and revises draft annotations at the deck level to reduce redundancy and improve coverage. The final output is a structured JSON annotation containing deck-level goals, section structure, slide-level summaries, question sets, and evaluation scores. Initial experiments on two technical lecture decks indicate that the pipeline can filter non-instructional slides and produce high-fidelity, pedagogically coherent questions for visually complex content. The working system is at https://slidesqaqa-974767694043.us-west1.run.app The software repository is at https://github.com/blinding2submit/slidesqaqa

Lecture videos distribute knowledge across speech, slide text, diagrams, equations, and presentation order, which transcript-only retrieval does not fully preserve. This paper presents an evidence-grounded multimodal pipeline that transcribes lectures, selects semantic anchors, applies optical character recognition (OCR), and uses a vision-language model to extract only concepts and typed relationships supported by transcript, OCR, or visual evidence. Mentions are validated and canonicalized into a provenance-rich knowledge graph. On three neural-network lectures, the pipeline processed 3,118 frames, 756 transcript segments, and 559 anchors. It retained 1,022 concept and 312 relationship mentions, yielding 172 canonical concepts and 282 relationships with 90.38% endpoint coverage. A preliminary three question retrieval test achieved 100% top-1 and top-3 accuracy and 100% mean top-5 recall. The contribution is an auditable construction method rather than a state-of-the-art performance claim.

Automatically generated videos from scientific papers are increasingly used for education and research dissemination. However, existing evaluation metrics mainly measure visual quality or whether key points from the paper appear in the video without assessing whether the video actually helps viewers understand the ideas. We introduce EffectivePresentationScorer, a framework for evaluating the instructional quality of scientific presentation videos. It checks whether a video explains the main ideas clearly, introduces needed background concepts, and connects technical details to the main contribution of the paper. When we apply EffectivePresentationScorer to the existing paper-to-video generation systems, we find that generated videos mention the correct topics and follow the structure of the paper but fail to explain prerequisite concepts or clarify why the method works. These failures are often ignored by existing video evaluation metrics, which focus on content presence rather than explanatory quality.