Ahmed Zaidi

Ahmed Zaidi, Andrew Caines, Russell Moore et al.

The forgetting curve has been extensively explored by psychologists, educationalists and cognitive scientists alike. In the context of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, modelling the forgetting curve for each user and knowledge component (e.g. vocabulary word) should enable us to develop optimal revision strategies that counteract memory decay and ensure long-term retention. In this study we explore a variety of forgetting curve models incorporating psychological and linguistic features, and we use these models to predict the probability of word recall by learners of English as a second language. We evaluate the impact of the models and their features using data from an online vocabulary teaching platform and find that word complexity is a highly informative feature which may be successfully learned by a neural network model.

Ahmed H. Zaidi, Russell Moore, Ted Briscoe

The structure of curriculum plays a vital role in our learning process, both as children and adults. Presenting material in ascending order of difficulty that also exploits prior knowledge can have a significant impact on the rate of learning. However, the notion of difficulty and prior knowledge differs from person to person. Motivated by the need for a personalised curriculum, we present a novel method of curriculum learning for vocabulary words in the form of visual prompts. We employ a reinforcement learning model grounded in pedagogical theories that emulates the actions of a tutor. We simulate three students with different levels of vocabulary knowledge in order to evaluate the how well our model adapts to the environment. The results of the simulation reveal that through interaction, the model is able to identify the areas of weakness, as well as push students to the edge of their ZPD. We hypothesise that these methods can also be effective in training agents to learn language representations in a simulated environment where it has previously been shown that order of words and prior knowledge play an important role in the efficacy of language learning.