ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs

Jifan Yu, Chenyu Wang, Gan Luo, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Zhiyuan Liu


Abstract
Within the prosperity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the education applications that automatically provide extracurricular knowledge for MOOC users become rising research topics. However, MOOC courses’ diversity and rapid updates make it more challenging to find suitable new knowledge for students. In this paper, we present ExpanRL, an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs. Employing a two-level HRL mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion, ExpanRL is more feasible to adjust the expansion strategy to find new concepts based on the students’ feedback on expansion results. Our experiments on nine novel datasets from real MOOCs show that ExpanRL achieves significant improvements over existing methods and maintain competitive performance under different settings.
Anthology ID:
2020.aacl-main.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Kam-Fai Wong, Kevin Knight, Hua Wu
Venue:
AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
770–780
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.77
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jifan Yu, Chenyu Wang, Gan Luo, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, and Zhiyuan Liu. 2020. ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 770–780, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (Yu et al., AACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.77.pdf