Abstract:Computerized adaptive testing(CAT) is designed to achieve efficient assessment through dynamic question selection. However, existing methods still suffer from insufficient accuracy in semantic modeling and ability estimation. To address these issues, a text-semantic enhanced graph neural network based CAT approach(TECAT) is proposed. Contextual semantic representations of questions and concepts are extracted using a pretrained language model, and multi-level dependencies among questions and concepts are captured by applying graph attention networks on the question-concept and concept-prerequisite graphs. To integrate semantic and structural information, a gated fusion mechanism based on additive attention and SiLU activation is introduced for the above two types of information to be adaptively combined. As a result, more expressive node representations are obtained. The CAT process is further formulated as a multi-objective reinforcement learning task to jointly optimize question quality, diversity, and novelty. A quality reward function based on changes in ability estimation error is designed to better reflect the contribution of each question to ability diagnosis. Experiments on two real-world datasets, Eedi and Junyi, show that TECAT achieves superior ability in estimation accuracy and concept representation quality compared with the existing methods.
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