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Empirically Evaluating the Effectiveness of POMDP vs. MDP Towards the Pedagogical Strategies Induction

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Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10948))

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Abstract

The effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) often depends upon their pedagogical strategies, the policies used to decide what action to take next in the face of alternatives. We induce policies based on two general Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks: POMDP&. MDP, given the limited feature space. We conduct an empirical study where the RL-induced policies are compared against a random yet reasonable policy. Results show that when the contents are controlled to be equal, the MDP-based policy can improve students’ learning significantly more than the random baseline while the POMDP-based policy cannot outperform the later. The possible reason is that the features selected for the MDP framework may not be the optimal feature space for POMDP.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the NSF Grants #1726550, #1651909, and #1432156.

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Correspondence to Shitian Shen , Behrooz Mostafavi , Collin Lynch , Tiffany Barnes or Min Chi .

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Shen, S., Mostafavi, B., Lynch, C., Barnes, T., Chi, M. (2018). Empirically Evaluating the Effectiveness of POMDP vs. MDP Towards the Pedagogical Strategies Induction. In: Penstein Rosé, C., et al. Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10948. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_61

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93845-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93846-2

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