AdaptKT: A Domain Adaptable Method for Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge tracing is a crucial and fundamental task in online education systems, which can predict students' knowledge state for personalized learning. Unfortunately, existing methods are domain-specific, whereas there are many domains (e.g., subjects, schools) in the real education scene and some domains suffer from the problem of lacking sufficient data. Therefore, how to exploit the knowledge in other domains, to improve the model's performance for target domain remains pretty much open. We term this problem as Domain Adaptation for Knowledge Tracing (DAKT), which aims to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target one for knowledge tracing. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptable method, namely Adaptable Knowledge Tracing (AdaptKT), which contains three phases to explore this problem. Specifically, phase I is instance selection. Given the question texts of two domains, we train an auto-encoder to select and embed similar instances from both domains. Phase II is distribution discrepancy minimizing. After obtaining the selected instances and their linguistic representations, we train a knowledge tracing model and adopt the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to minimize the discrepancy between the distributions of the domain-specific knowledge states. Phase III is fine-tuning of the output layer. We replace the output layer of the model that trained in phase II by a new one to make the knowledge tracing model's output dimension matches the number of knowledge concepts in the target domain. The new output layer is trained while other parameters that before it are frozen. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets, where the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaptKT for solving DAKT problem. We will public the code on the Github after the acceptance of the paper.