Md. Fahim

Mohd. Sayemul Haque, Md. Fahim, Muhammad Ibrahim

Learning-to-rank is an applied domain of supervised machine learning. As feature selection has been found to be effective for improving the accuracy of learning models in general, it is intriguing to investigate this process for learning-to-rank domain. In this study, we investigate the use of a popular meta-heuristic approach called simulated annealing for this task. Under the general framework of simulated annealing, we explore various neighborhood selection strategies and temperature cooling schemes. We further introduce a new hyper-parameter called the progress parameter that can effectively be used to traverse the search space. Our algorithms are evaluated on five publicly benchmark datasets of learning-to-rank. For a better validation, we also compare the simulated annealing-based feature selection algorithm with another effective meta-heuristic algorithm, namely local beam search. Extensive experimental results shows the efficacy of our proposed models.

Shadman Rohan, Ishita Sur Apan, Muhtasim Ibteda Shochcho et al.

We present Team BD's submission to the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors, under Track 1 (Mistake Identification) and Track 2 (Mistake Location). Both tracks involve three-class classification of tutor responses in educational dialogues - determining if a tutor correctly recognizes a student's mistake (Track 1) and whether the tutor pinpoints the mistake's location (Track 2). Our system is built on MPNet, a Transformer-based language model that combines BERT and XLNet's pre-training advantages. We fine-tuned MPNet on the task data using a class-weighted cross-entropy loss to handle class imbalance, and leveraged grouped cross-validation (10 folds) to maximize the use of limited data while avoiding dialogue overlap between training and validation. We then performed a hard-voting ensemble of the best models from each fold, which improves robustness and generalization by combining multiple classifiers. Our approach achieved strong results on both tracks, with exact-match macro-F1 scores of approximately 0.7110 for Mistake Identification and 0.5543 for Mistake Location on the official test set. We include comprehensive analysis of our system's performance, including confusion matrices and t-SNE visualizations to interpret classifier behavior, as well as a taxonomy of common errors with examples. We hope our ensemble-based approach and findings provide useful insights for designing reliable tutor response evaluation systems in educational dialogue settings.