Explainable exercise recommendation with knowledge graph.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
PMID:

Abstract

Recommending suitable exercises and providing the reasons for these recommendations is a highly valuable task, as it can significantly improve students' learning efficiency. Nevertheless, the extensive range of exercise resources and the diverse learning capacities of students present a notable difficulty in recommending exercises. Collaborative filtering approaches frequently have difficulties in recommending suitable exercises, whereas deep learning methods lack explanation, which restricts their practical use. To address these issue, this paper proposes KG4EER, an explainable exercise recommendation with a knowledge graph. KG4EER facilitates the matching of various students with suitable exercises and offers explanations for its recommendations. More precisely, a feature extraction module is introduced to represent students' learning features, and a knowledge graph is constructed to recommend exercises. This knowledge graph, which includes three primary entities - knowledge concepts, students, and exercises - and their interrelationships, serves to recommend suitable exercises. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets, coupled with expert interviews, establish the superiority of KG4EER over existing baseline methods and underscore its robust explainability.

Authors

  • Quanlong Guan
    College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. Electronic address: gql@jnu.edu.cn.
  • Xinghe Cheng
    College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; Guangdong Institution of Smart Education, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. Electronic address: jnuchengxh@hotmail.com.
  • Fang Xiao
    Department of Gastroenterology, Tongji Hospital of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
  • Zhuzhou Li
    College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; Guangdong Institution of Smart Education, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
  • Chaobo He
    School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China. Electronic address: hechaobo@m.scnu.edu.cn.
  • Liangda Fang
    College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
  • Guanliang Chen
    Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Electronic address: guanliang.chen@monash.edu.
  • Zhiguo Gong
    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Macao Special Administrative Region of China.
  • Weiqi Luo