Autobalanced Multitask Node Embedding Framework for Intelligent Education.

Abstract

Recently, online education has become popular. Many e-learning platforms have been launched with various intelligent services aimed at improving the learning efficiency and effectiveness of learners. Graphs are used to describe the pairwise relations between entities, and the node embedding technique is the foundation of many intelligent services, which have received increasing attention from researchers. However, the graph in the intelligent education scenario has three noteworthy properties, namely, heterogeneity, evolution, and lopsidedness, which makes it challenging to implement ecumenical node embedding methods on it. In this article, an autobalanced multitask node embedding model is proposed, named MNE, and applied to the interaction graph, settling a few actual tasks in intelligent education. More specifically, MNE builds two purpose-built self-supervised node embedding learning tasks for heterogeneous evolutive graphs. Edge-specific reconstruction tasks are built according to the semantic information and properties of the heterogeneous edges, and an evolutive weight regression task is designed, aiding the model to perceive the evolution of learners' implicit cognitive states. Then, both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification techniques are introduced, achieving both task- and node-level weight estimation and instructing subtask autobalancing. Experimental results on real-world datasets indicate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art graph embedding methods on two assessment tasks and demonstrates the validity of the proposed multitask framework and subtask balancing mechanism. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/ccnu-mathits/MNE4HEN.