@inproceedings{bulut-etal-2024-item,
    title = "Item Difficulty and Response Time Prediction with Large Language Models: An Empirical Analysis of {USMLE} Items",
    author = "Bulut, Okan  and
      Gorgun, Guher  and
      Tan, Bin",
    editor = {Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Bexte, Marie  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Tack, Ana{\"i}s  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.bea-1.44/",
    pages = "522--527",
    abstract = "This paper summarizes our methodology and results for the BEA 2024 Shared Task. This competition focused on predicting item difficulty and response time for retired multiple-choice items from the United States Medical Licensing Examination{\textregistered} (USMLE{\textregistered}). We extracted linguistic features from the item stem and response options using multiple methods, including the BiomedBERT model, FastText embeddings, and Coh-Metrix. The extracted features were combined with additional features available in item metadata (e.g., item type) to predict item difficulty and average response time. The results showed that the BiomedBERT model was the most effective in predicting item difficulty, while the fine-tuned model based on FastText word embeddings was the best model for predicting response time."
}