Difficulty-Focused Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Tracing with a Large Language Model-Based Difficulty Prediction

Unggi Lee, Sungjun Yoon, Joon Seo Yun, Kyoungsoo Park, YoungHoon Jung, Damji Stratton, Hyeoncheol Kim


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.438
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4891–4900
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.438
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Unggi Lee, Sungjun Yoon, Joon Seo Yun, Kyoungsoo Park, YoungHoon Jung, Damji Stratton, and Hyeoncheol Kim. 2024. Difficulty-Focused Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Tracing with a Large Language Model-Based Difficulty Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4891–4900, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Difficulty-Focused Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Tracing with a Large Language Model-Based Difficulty Prediction (Lee et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.438.pdf
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 2024.lrec-main.438.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip