Semantic TrueLearn: Using Semantic Knowledge Graphs in Recommendation Systems
This work addresses the problem of improving educational recommendations for lifelong learners by incorporating semantic knowledge, though it appears incremental as it builds on the existing TrueLearn algorithm.
The paper tackled the challenge of handling semantic and hierarchical structures in educational recommendation systems by introducing Semantic TrueLearn, a novel learner model that uses the Wikipedia link graph to incorporate semantic relatedness between knowledge topics, resulting in statistically significant improvements in predictive performance.
In informational recommenders, many challenges arise from the need to handle the semantic and hierarchical structure between knowledge areas. This work aims to advance towards building a state-aware educational recommendation system that incorporates semantic relatedness between knowledge topics, propagating latent information across semantically related topics. We introduce a novel learner model that exploits this semantic relatedness between knowledge components in learning resources using the Wikipedia link graph, with the aim to better predict learner engagement and latent knowledge in a lifelong learning scenario. In this sense, Semantic TrueLearn builds a humanly intuitive knowledge representation while leveraging Bayesian machine learning to improve the predictive performance of the educational engagement. Our experiments with a large dataset demonstrate that this new semantic version of TrueLearn algorithm achieves statistically significant improvements in terms of predictive performance with a simple extension that adds semantic awareness to the model.