YA-TA: Towards Personalized Question-Answering Teaching Assistants using Instructor-Student Dual Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Fusion
This addresses the problem of limited instructor-student engagement in large educational settings, offering a personalized teaching assistant solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of providing timely and personalized support in large classes by proposing YA-TA, a Virtual Teaching Assistant that uses a Dual Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Fusion framework to generate responses grounded in lectures, with experiments in real-world classrooms showing it excels in aligning responses with retrieved instructor and student knowledge.
Engagement between instructors and students plays a crucial role in enhancing students'academic performance. However, instructors often struggle to provide timely and personalized support in large classes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Virtual Teaching Assistant (VTA) named YA-TA, designed to offer responses to students that are grounded in lectures and are easy to understand. To facilitate YA-TA, we introduce the Dual Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Fusion (DRAKE) framework, which incorporates dual retrieval of instructor and student knowledge and knowledge fusion for tailored response generation. Experiments conducted in real-world classroom settings demonstrate that the DRAKE framework excels in aligning responses with knowledge retrieved from both instructor and student sides. Furthermore, we offer additional extensions of YA-TA, such as a Q&A board and self-practice tools to enhance the overall learning experience. Our video is publicly available.