Problem-Solving Guide: Predicting the Algorithm Tags and Difficulty for Competitive Programming Problems
This work addresses a practical need for AI-based education tools to help developers improve algorithm-solving skills, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tag prediction tasks by adding difficulty prediction.
The study tackled the problem of predicting algorithm tags and difficulty levels for competitive programming problems to aid engineers in problem-solving, resulting in the creation of a large-scale dataset and a novel deep learning method for multi-task prediction.
The recent program development industries have required problem-solving abilities for engineers, especially application developers. However, AI-based education systems to help solve computer algorithm problems have not yet attracted attention, while most big tech companies require the ability to solve algorithm problems including Google, Meta, and Amazon. The most useful guide to solving algorithm problems might be guessing the category (tag) of the facing problems. Therefore, our study addresses the task of predicting the algorithm tag as a useful tool for engineers and developers. Moreover, we also consider predicting the difficulty levels of algorithm problems, which can be used as useful guidance to calculate the required time to solve that problem. In this paper, we present a real-world algorithm problem multi-task dataset, AMT, by mainly collecting problem samples from the most famous and large competitive programming website Codeforces. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed dataset is the most large-scale dataset for predicting algorithm tags compared to previous studies. Moreover, our work is the first to address predicting the difficulty levels of algorithm problems. We present a deep learning-based novel method for simultaneously predicting algorithm tags and the difficulty levels of an algorithm problem given. All datasets and source codes are available at https://github.com/sronger/PSG_Predicting_Algorithm_Tags_and_Difficulty.