Learning from Interpretable Analysis: Attention-Based Knowledge Tracing

Zhu, Jia; Yu, Weihao; Zheng, Zetao; Huang, Changqin; Tang, Yong; Fung, Gabriel Pui Cheong

Knowledge tracing is a well-established problem and non-trivial task in personalized education. In recent years, many existing works have been proposed to handle the knowledge tracing task, particularly recurrent neural networks based methods, e.g., Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT). However, DKT has the problem of vibration in prediction outputs. In this paper, to better understand the problem of DKT, we utilize a mathematical computation model named Finite State Automaton(FSA), which can change from one state to another in response to the external input, to interpret the hidden state transition of the DKT when receiving inputs. And we discover the root cause of the two problems is that the DKT can not handle the long sequence input with the help of FSA. Accordingly, we propose an effective attention-based model, which can solve the above problem by directly capturing the relationships among each item of the input regardless of the length of the input sequence. The experimental results show that our proposed model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on several well-known corpora.