2 research outputs found
Empowering Active Learning to Jointly Optimize System and User Demands
Existing approaches to active learning maximize the system performance by
sampling unlabeled instances for annotation that yield the most efficient
training. However, when active learning is integrated with an end-user
application, this can lead to frustration for participating users, as they
spend time labeling instances that they would not otherwise be interested in
reading. In this paper, we propose a new active learning approach that jointly
optimizes the seemingly counteracting objectives of the active learning system
(training efficiently) and the user (receiving useful instances). We study our
approach in an educational application, which particularly benefits from this
technique as the system needs to rapidly learn to predict the appropriateness
of an exercise to a particular user, while the users should receive only
exercises that match their skills. We evaluate multiple learning strategies and
user types with data from real users and find that our joint approach better
satisfies both objectives when alternative methods lead to many unsuitable
exercises for end users.Comment: To appear as a long paper in Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020). Download our
code and simulated user models at github:
https://github.com/UKPLab/acl2020-empowering-active-learnin
Generating Vocabulary Sets for Implicit Language Learning using Masked Language Modeling
A well-balanced language curriculum must include both explicit vocabulary learning and implicit vocabulary learning. However, most language learning applications focus on explicit instruction. Students require support with implicit vocabulary learning because they need enough context to guess and acquire new words. Traditional techniques aim to teach students enough vocabulary to comprehend the text, thus enabling them to acquire new words. Despite the wide variety of support for vocabulary learning offered by learning applications today, few offer guidance on how to select an optimal vocabulary study set. This paper proposes a novel method of student modeling with masked language modeling to detect words that are required for comprehension of a text. It explores the efficacy of using deep learning via a pre-trained masked language model to model human reading comprehension and presents a vocabulary study set generation pipeline (VSGP). Promising results show that masked language modeling can be used to model human comprehension and the pipeline produces reasonably sized vocabulary study sets that can be integrated into language learning systems