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Classifying Math Knowledge Components via Task-Adaptive Pre-Trained BERT

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Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12748))

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Abstract

Educational content labeled with proper knowledge components (KCs) are particularly useful to teachers or content organizers. However, manually labeling educational content is labor intensive and error-prone. To address this challenge, prior research proposed machine learning based solutions to auto-label educational content with limited success. In this work, we significantly improve prior research by (1) expanding the input types to include KC descriptions, instructional video titles, and problem descriptions (i.e., three types of prediction task), (2) doubling the granularity of the prediction from 198 to 385 KC labels (i.e., more practical setting but much harder multinomial classification problem), (3) improving the prediction accuracies by 0.5–2.3% using Task-adaptive Pre-trained BERT, outperforming six baselines, and (4) proposing a simple evaluation measure by which we can recover 56–73% of mispredicted KC labels. All codes and data sets in the experiments are available at: https://github.com/tbs17/TAPT-BERT

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.corestandards.org.

  2. 2.

    http://www.corestandards.org/math.

  3. 3.

    http://www.k12.com.

  4. 4.

    http://developers.google.com/youtube/v3.

  5. 5.

    http://www.assistments.org/.

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Acknowledgement

The work was mainly supported by NSF awards (1940236, 1940076, 1940093). In addition, the work of Neil Heffernan was in part supported by NSF awards (1917808, 1931523, 1917713, 1903304, 1822830, 1759229), IES (R305A170137, R305A170243, R305A180401, R305A180401), EIR (U411B190024) and ONR (N00014-18-1-2768) and Schmidt Futures.

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Shen, J.T. et al. (2021). Classifying Math Knowledge Components via Task-Adaptive Pre-Trained BERT. In: Roll, I., McNamara, D., Sosnovsky, S., Luckin, R., Dimitrova, V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12748. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78292-4_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78292-4_33

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