User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction最新文献

Conversational recommender systems aim at recommending the most relevant information for users based on textual or spoken dialogues, through which users can communicate their preferences to the system more efficiently. Argumentative conversational recommender systems represent a kind of deliberation dialogue in which participants share their specific beliefs in the respective representations of the common ground, to act towards a common goal. The goal of such systems is to present appropriate supporting arguments to their recommendations to show the interlocutor that a specific item corresponds to their manifested interests. Here, we present a cross-disciplinary argumentation-based conversational recommender model based on cognitive pragmatics. We also present a dialogue simulator to investigate the quality of the theoretical background. We produced a set of synthetic dialogues based on a computational model implementing the linguistic theory and we collected human evaluations about the plausibility and efficiency of these dialogues. Our results show that the synthetic dialogues obtain high scores concerning their naturalness and the selection of the supporting arguments.

In recent years, we have seen a significant proliferation of e-learning platforms. E-learning platforms allow teachers to create digital courses in a more effective and time-saving way, but several flaws hinder their actual success. One main problem is that teachers have difficulties finding and combining open-access learning materials that match their specific needs precisely when there are so many to choose from. This paper proposes a new strategy for creating digital courses that use learning objects (LOs) as primary elements. The idea consists of using an intelligent chatbot to assist teachers in their activities. Defined using RASA technology, the chatbot asks for information about the course the teacher has to create based on her/his profile and needs. It suggests the best LOs and how to combine them according to their prerequisites and outcomes. A chatbot-based recommendation system provides suggestions through BERT, a machine-learning model based on Transformers, to define the semantic similarity between the entered data and the LOs metadata. In addition, the chatbot also suggests how to combine the LOs into a final learning path. Finally, the paper presents some preliminary results about tests carried out by teachers in creating their digital courses.

Adaptive learning systems offer a personalised digital environment that continually adjusts to the learner and the material, with the goal of maximising learning gains. Whenever such a system encounters a new learner, or when a returning learner starts studying new material, the system first has to determine the difficulty of the material for that specific learner. Failing to address this “cold-start” problem leads to suboptimal learning and potential disengagement from the system, as the system may present problems of an inappropriate difficulty or provide unhelpful feedback. In a simulation study conducted on a large educational data set from an adaptive fact learning system (about 100 million trials from almost 140 thousand learners), we predicted individual learning parameters from response data. Using these predicted parameters as starting estimates for the adaptive learning system yielded a more accurate model of learners’ memory performance than using default values. We found that predictions based on the difficulty of the fact (“what”) generally outperformed predictions based on the ability of the learner (“who”), though both contributed to better model estimates. This work extends a previous smaller-scale laboratory-based experiment in which using fact-specific predictions in a cold-start scenario improved learning outcomes. The current findings suggest that similar cold-start alleviation may be possible in real-world educational settings. The improved predictions can be harnessed to increase the efficiency of the learning system, mitigate the negative effects of a cold start, and potentially improve learning outcomes.

This paper introduces a novel approach for leveraging inertial data to discern expertise levels in motor skill execution, specifically distinguishing between experts and beginners. By implementing inertial data transformation and fusion techniques, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of motor behaviour. Our approach goes beyond conventional assessments, providing nuanced insights into the underlying patterns of movement. Additionally, we explore the potential for utilising this data-driven methodology to aid novice practitioners in enhancing their performance. The findings showcase the efficacy of this approach in accurately identifying proficiency levels and lay the groundwork for personalised interventions to support skill refinement and mastery. This research contributes to the field of motor skill assessment and intervention strategies, with broad implications for sports training, physical rehabilitation, and performance optimisation across various domains.

Personalization in online learning environments has been extensively studied at various levels, ranging from adaptive hints during task-solving to recommending whole courses. In this study, we focus on recommending learning activities (sequences of homogeneous tasks). We argue that this is an important yet insufficiently explored area, particularly when considering the requirements of large-scale online learning environments used in practice. To address this gap, we propose a modular rule-based framework for recommendations and thoroughly explain the rationale behind the proposal. We also discuss a specific application of the framework.

In this study, we propose a novel SeqMF model to solve the problem of predicting the next app launch during mobile device usage. Although this problem can be represented as a classical collaborative filtering problem, it requires proper modification since the data are sequential, the user feedback is distributed among devices, and the transmission of users’ data to aggregate common patterns must be protected against leakage. According to such requirements, we modify the structure of the classical matrix factorization model and update the training procedure to sequential learning. Since the data about user experience are distributed among devices, the federated learning setup is used to train the proposed sequential matrix factorization model. One more ingredient of our approach is a new privacy mechanism that guarantees the protection of the sent data from the users to the remote server. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model, we use publicly available mobile user behavior data. We compare our model with sequential rules and models based on the frequency of app launches. The comparison is conducted in static and dynamic environments. The static environment evaluates how our model processes sequential data compared to competitors. The dynamic environment emulates the real-world scenario, where users generate new data by running apps on devices. Our experiments show that the proposed model provides comparable quality with other methods in the static environment. However, more importantly, our method achieves a better privacy-utility trade-off than competitors in the dynamic environment, which provides more accurate simulations of real-world usage.