Peter Brusilovsky

Chunpai Wang, Shaghayegh Sahebi, Siqian Zhao et al.

Knowledge Tracing (KT), which aims to model student knowledge level and predict their performance, is one of the most important applications of user modeling. Modern KT approaches model and maintain an up-to-date state of student knowledge over a set of course concepts according to students' historical performance in attempting the problems. However, KT approaches were designed to model knowledge by observing relatively small problem-solving steps in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. While these approaches were applied successfully to model student knowledge by observing student solutions for simple problems, they do not perform well for modeling complex problem solving in students.M ost importantly, current models assume that all problem attempts are equally valuable in quantifying current student knowledge.However, for complex problems that involve many concepts at the same time, this assumption is deficient. In this paper, we argue that not all attempts are equivalently important in discovering students' knowledge state, and some attempts can be summarized together to better represent student performance. We propose a novel student knowledge tracing approach, Granular RAnk based TEnsor factorization (GRATE), that dynamically selects student attempts that can be aggregated while predicting students' performance in problems and discovering the concepts presented in them. Our experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the improved performance of GRATE, compared to the state-of-the-art baselines, in the task of student performance prediction. Our further analysis shows that attempt aggregation eliminates the unnecessary fluctuations from students' discovered knowledge states and helps in discovering complex latent concepts in the problems.

Rui Meng, Sanqiang Zhao, Shuguang Han et al.

Keyphrase provides highly-condensed information that can be effectively used for understanding, organizing and retrieving text content. Though previous studies have provided many workable solutions for automated keyphrase extraction, they commonly divided the to-be-summarized content into multiple text chunks, then ranked and selected the most meaningful ones. These approaches could neither identify keyphrases that do not appear in the text, nor capture the real semantic meaning behind the text. We propose a generative model for keyphrase prediction with an encoder-decoder framework, which can effectively overcome the above drawbacks. We name it as deep keyphrase generation since it attempts to capture the deep semantic meaning of the content with a deep learning method. Empirical analysis on six datasets demonstrates that our proposed model not only achieves a significant performance boost on extracting keyphrases that appear in the source text, but also can generate absent keyphrases based on the semantic meaning of the text. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/memray/OpenNMT-kpg-release.

Jan Cegin, Branislav Pecher, Jakub Simko et al.

The latest generative large language models (LLMs) have found their application in data augmentation tasks, where small numbers of text samples are LLM-paraphrased and then used to fine-tune downstream models. However, more research is needed to assess how different prompts, seed data selection strategies, filtering methods, or model settings affect the quality of paraphrased data (and downstream models). In this study, we investigate three text diversity incentive methods well established in crowdsourcing: taboo words, hints by previous outlier solutions, and chaining on previous outlier solutions. Using these incentive methods as part of instructions to LLMs augmenting text datasets, we measure their effects on generated texts lexical diversity and downstream model performance. We compare the effects over 5 different LLMs, 6 datasets and 2 downstream models. We show that diversity is most increased by taboo words, but downstream model performance is highest with hints.

Mohammad Hassany, Peter Brusilovsky, Jiaze Ke et al.

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide line-by-line explanations for a large number of examples typically used in a programming class. In this paper, we explore and assess a human-AI collaboration approach to authoring worked examples for Java programming. We introduce an authoring system for creating Java worked examples that generates a starting version of code explanations and presents it to the instructor to edit if necessary.We also present a study that assesses the quality of explanations created with this approach

Mohammad Hassany, Peter Brusilovsky, Jiaze Ke et al.

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide line-by-line explanations for a large number of examples typically used in a programming class. In this paper, we explore and assess a human-AI collaboration approach to authoring worked examples for Java programming. We introduce an authoring system for creating Java worked examples that generates a starting version of code explanations and presents it to the instructor to edit if necessary. We also present a study that assesses the quality of explanations created with this approach.

Jan Cegin, Branislav Pecher, Jakub Simko et al.

The generative large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for data augmentation tasks, where text samples are paraphrased (or generated anew) and then used for classifier fine-tuning. Existing works on augmentation leverage the few-shot scenarios, where samples are given to LLMs as part of prompts, leading to better augmentations. Yet, the samples are mostly selected randomly and a comprehensive overview of the effects of other (more ``informed'') sample selection strategies is lacking. In this work, we compare sample selection strategies existing in few-shot learning literature and investigate their effects in LLM-based textual augmentation. We evaluate this on in-distribution and out-of-distribution classifier performance. Results indicate, that while some ``informed'' selection strategies increase the performance of models, especially for out-of-distribution data, it happens only seldom and with marginal performance increases. Unless further advances are made, a default of random sample selection remains a good option for augmentation practitioners.

Muntasir Hoq, Griffin Pitts, Andrew Lan et al.

Effective personalized learning in computer science education depends on accurately modeling what students know and what they need to learn. While Knowledge Components (KCs) provide a foundation for such modeling, automated KC extraction from student code is inherently challenging due to insufficient explainability of discovered KCs and the open-endedness of programming problems with significant structural variability across student solutions and complex interactions among programming concepts. In this work, we propose a novel, explainable framework for automated KC discovery through pattern-based KCs: recurring structural patterns within student code that capture the specific programming patterns and language constructs that students must master. Toward this, we train a Variational Autoencoder to generate important representative patterns from student code guided by an explainable, attention-based code representation model that identifies important correct and incorrect pattern implementations from student code. These patterns are then clustered to form pattern-based KCs. We evaluate our KCs using two well-established methods informed by Cognitive Science: learning curve analysis and Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT). Experimental results demonstrate meaningful learning trajectories and significant improvements in DKT predictive performance over traditional KT methods. This work advances knowledge modeling in CS education by providing an automated, scalable, and explainable framework for identifying granular code patterns and algorithmic constructs, essential for student learning.

Zhangqi Duan, Nigel Fernandez, Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan et al.

Knowledge components (KCs) mapped to problems help model student learning, tracking their mastery levels on fine-grained skills thereby facilitating personalized learning and feedback in online learning platforms. However, crafting and tagging KCs to problems, traditionally performed by human domain experts, is highly labor intensive. We present an automated, LLM-based pipeline for KC generation and tagging for open-ended programming problems. We also develop an LLM-based knowledge tracing (KT) framework to leverage these LLM-generated KCs, which we refer to as KCGen-KT. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two real-world student code submission datasets in different programming languages.We find that KCGen-KT outperforms existing KT methods and human-written KCs on future student response prediction. We investigate the learning curves of generated KCs and show that LLM-generated KCs result in a better fit than human written KCs under a cognitive model. We also conduct a human evaluation with course instructors to show that our pipeline generates reasonably accurate problem-KC mappings.

Jan Cegin, Jakub Simko, Peter Brusilovsky

The emergence of generative large language models (LLMs) raises the question: what will be its impact on crowdsourcing? Traditionally, crowdsourcing has been used for acquiring solutions to a wide variety of human-intelligence tasks, including ones involving text generation, modification or evaluation. For some of these tasks, models like ChatGPT can potentially substitute human workers. In this study, we investigate whether this is the case for the task of paraphrase generation for intent classification. We apply data collection methodology of an existing crowdsourcing study (similar scale, prompts and seed data) using ChatGPT and Falcon-40B. We show that ChatGPT-created paraphrases are more diverse and lead to at least as robust models.

Mengdi Wang, Hung Chau, Khushboo Thaker et al.

With the increased popularity of electronic textbooks, there is a growing interests in developing a new generation of "intelligent textbooks", which have the ability to guide the readers according to their learning goals and current knowledge. The intelligent textbooks extend regular textbooks by integrating machine-manipulatable knowledge such as a knowledge map or a prerequisite-outcome relationship between sections, among which, the most popular integrated knowledge is a list of unique knowledge concepts associated with each section. With the help of this concept, multiple intelligent operations, such as content linking, content recommendation or student modeling, can be performed. However, annotating a reliable set of concepts to a textbook section is a challenge. Automatic unsupervised methods for extracting key-phrases as the concepts are known to have insufficient accuracy. Manual annotation by experts is considered as a preferred approach and can be used to produce both the target outcome and the labeled data for training supervised models. However, most researchers in education domain still consider the concept annotation process as an ad-hoc activity rather than an engineering task, resulting in low-quality annotated data. In this paper, we present a textbook knowledge engineering method to obtain reliable concept annotations. The outcomes of our work include a validated knowledge engineering procedure, a code-book for technical concept annotation, and a set of concept annotations for the target textbook, which could be used as gold standard in further research.

Rui Meng, Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang et al.

Recently, concatenating multiple keyphrases as a target sequence has been proposed as a new learning paradigm for keyphrase generation. Existing studies concatenate target keyphrases in different orders but no study has examined the effects of ordering on models' behavior. In this paper, we propose several orderings for concatenation and inspect the important factors for training a successful keyphrase generation model. By running comprehensive comparisons, we observe one preferable ordering and summarize a number of empirical findings and challenges, which can shed light on future research on this line of work.

Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Rui Meng et al.

Different texts shall by nature correspond to different number of keyphrases. This desideratum is largely missing from existing neural keyphrase generation models. In this study, we address this problem from both modeling and evaluation perspectives. We first propose a recurrent generative model that generates multiple keyphrases as delimiter-separated sequences. Generation diversity is further enhanced with two novel techniques by manipulating decoder hidden states. In contrast to previous approaches, our model is capable of generating diverse keyphrases and controlling number of outputs. We further propose two evaluation metrics tailored towards the variable-number generation. We also introduce a new dataset StackEx that expands beyond the only existing genre (i.e., academic writing) in keyphrase generation tasks. With both previous and new evaluation metrics, our model outperforms strong baselines on all datasets.