11,306 research outputs found
Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks for Knowledge Tracing
Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a task of tracing evolving knowledge state of
students with respect to one or more concepts as they engage in a sequence of
learning activities. One important purpose of KT is to personalize the practice
sequence to help students learn knowledge concepts efficiently. However,
existing methods such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing and Deep Knowledge Tracing
either model knowledge state for each predefined concept separately or fail to
pinpoint exactly which concepts a student is good at or unfamiliar with. To
solve these problems, this work introduces a new model called Dynamic Key-Value
Memory Networks (DKVMN) that can exploit the relationships between underlying
concepts and directly output a student's mastery level of each concept. Unlike
standard memory-augmented neural networks that facilitate a single memory
matrix or two static memory matrices, our model has one static matrix called
key, which stores the knowledge concepts and the other dynamic matrix called
value, which stores and updates the mastery levels of corresponding concepts.
Experiments show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art
model in a range of KT datasets. Moreover, the DKVMN model can automatically
discover underlying concepts of exercises typically performed by human
annotations and depict the changing knowledge state of a student.Comment: To appear in 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW),
201
Advancement Auto-Assessment of Students Knowledge States from Natural Language Input
Knowledge Assessment is a key element in adaptive instructional systems and in particular in Intelligent Tutoring Systems because fully adaptive tutoring presupposes accurate assessment. However, this is a challenging research problem as numerous factors affect students’ knowledge state estimation such as the difficulty level of the problem, time spent in solving the problem, etc. In this research work, we tackle this research problem from three perspectives: assessing the prior knowledge of students, assessing the natural language short and long students’ responses, and knowledge tracing.Prior knowledge assessment is an important component of knowledge assessment as it facilitates the adaptation of the instruction from the very beginning, i.e., when the student starts interacting with the (computer) tutor. Grouping students into groups with similar mental models and patterns of prior level of knowledge allows the system to select the right level of scaffolding for each group of students. While not adapting instruction to each individual learner, the advantage of adapting to groups of students based on a limited number of prior knowledge levels has the advantage of decreasing the authoring costs of the tutoring system. To achieve this goal of identifying or clustering students based on their prior knowledge, we have employed effective clustering algorithms. Automatically assessing open-ended student responses is another challenging aspect of knowledge assessment in ITSs. In dialogue-based ITSs, the main interaction between the learner and the system is natural language dialogue in which students freely respond to various system prompts or initiate dialogue moves in mixed-initiative dialogue systems. Assessing freely generated student responses in such contexts is challenging as students can express the same idea in different ways owing to different individual style preferences and varied individual cognitive abilities. To address this challenging task, we have proposed several novel deep learning models as they are capable to capture rich high-level semantic features of text. Knowledge tracing (KT) is an important type of knowledge assessment which consists of tracking students’ mastery of knowledge over time and predicting their future performances. Despite the state-of-the-art results of deep learning in this task, it has many limitations. For instance, most of the proposed methods ignore pertinent information (e.g., Prior knowledge) that can enhance the knowledge tracing capability and performance. Working toward this objective, we have proposed a generic deep learning framework that accounts for the engagement level of students, the difficulty of questions and the semantics of the questions and uses a novel times series model called Temporal Convolutional Network for future performance prediction. The advanced auto-assessment methods presented in this dissertation should enable better ways to estimate learner’s knowledge states and in turn the adaptive scaffolding those systems can provide which in turn should lead to more effective tutoring and better learning gains for students. Furthermore, the proposed method should enable more scalable development and deployment of ITSs across topics and domains for the benefit of all learners of all ages and backgrounds
Teaching Categories to Human Learners with Visual Explanations
We study the problem of computer-assisted teaching with explanations.
Conventional approaches for machine teaching typically only provide feedback at
the instance level e.g., the category or label of the instance. However, it is
intuitive that clear explanations from a knowledgeable teacher can
significantly improve a student's ability to learn a new concept. To address
these existing limitations, we propose a teaching framework that provides
interpretable explanations as feedback and models how the learner incorporates
this additional information. In the case of images, we show that we can
automatically generate explanations that highlight the parts of the image that
are responsible for the class label. Experiments on human learners illustrate
that, on average, participants achieve better test set performance on
challenging categorization tasks when taught with our interpretable approach
compared to existing methods
- …