This paper presents novel techniques for enhancing the performance of knowledge tracing (KT) models by focusing on the crucial factor of question and concept difficulty level. Despite the acknowledged significance of difficulty, previous KT research has yet to exploit its potential for model optimization and has struggled to predict difficulty from unseen data. To address these problems, we propose a difficulty-centered contrastive learning method for KT models and a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for difficulty prediction. These innovative methods seek to improve the performance of KT models and provide accurate difficulty estimates for unseen data. Our ablation study demonstrates the efficacy of these techniques by demonstrating enhanced KT model performance. Nonetheless, the complex relationship between language and difficulty merits further investigation.

Recently, language models have demonstrated exceptional performance compared to their predecessors. In this context, attention mechanisms and pre-training significantly contribute to the enhanced performance of modern language models. Additionally, a continuously increasing number of parameters plays a crucial role in these advancements . However, an increase in the number of parameters significantly increases the GPU memory and training time required during fine-tuning of language models, this makes fine-tuning infeasible in environments with limited computing resources. Furthermore, after fine-tuning, the storage space required for deployment increases proportionally with the number of tasks, making it challenging to deploy devices with limited storage capacities. In this study, we propose IT-Tuning, a Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning method that introduces a new concept called information tokens to address these issues.

We propose a sentiment analyzer for the prediction of document-level sentiments of English micro-blog messages from Twitter. The proposed method is based on lexicon integrated convolutional neural networks with attention (LCA). Its performance was evaluated using the datasets provided by SemEval competition (Task 4). The proposed sentiment analyzer obtained an average F1 of 55.2%, an average recall of 58.9% and an accuracy of 61.4%.