Assessing the helpfulness of learning materials with inference-based learner-like agent

Yun Hsuan Jen, Chieh Yang Huang, Mei Hua Chen, Ting Hao Huang, Lun Wei Ku

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Many English-as-a-second language learners have trouble using near-synonym words (e.g., small vs. little; briefly vs. shortly) correctly, and often look for example sentences to learn how two nearly synonymous terms differ. Prior work uses hand-crafted scores to recommend sentences but have difficulty in adopting such scores to all the near-synonyms as near-synonyms differ in various ways. We notice that the helpfulness of the learning material would reflect on the learners' performance. Thus, we propose the inference-based learner-like agent to mimic learner behavior and identify good learning materials by examining the agent's performance. To enable the agent to behave like a learner, we leverages entailment modeling's capability of inferring answers from the provided materials. Experimental results show that the proposed agent is equipped with good learner-like behavior to achieve the best performance in both fill-in-the-blank (FITB) and good example sentence selection tasks. We further conduct a classroom user study with college ESL learners. The results of the user study show that the proposed agent can find out example sentences that help students learn more easily and efficiently. Compared to other models, the proposed agent improves the score of more than 17% of students after learning.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2020 - 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3807-3817
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148606
StatePublished - 2020
Event2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Nov 16 2020Nov 20 2020

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2020 - 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/16/2011/20/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Information Systems
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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