Modern machine learning methods are critical to the development of
large-scale personalized learning systems that cater directly to the needs of
individual learners. The recently developed SPARse Factor Analysis (SPARFA)
framework provides a new statistical model and algorithms for machine
learning-based learning analytics, which estimate a learner's knowledge of the
latent concepts underlying a domain, and content analytics, which estimate the
relationships among a collection of questions and the latent concepts. SPARFA
estimates these quantities given only the binary-valued graded responses to a
collection of questions. In order to better interpret the estimated latent
concepts, SPARFA relies on a post-processing step that utilizes user-defined
tags (e.g., topics or keywords) available for each question. In this paper, we
relax the need for user-defined tags by extending SPARFA to jointly process
both graded learner responses and the text of each question and its associated
answer(s) or other feedback. Our purely data-driven approach (i) enhances the
interpretability of the estimated latent concepts without the need of
explicitly generating a set of tags or performing a post-processing step, (ii)
improves the prediction performance of SPARFA, and (iii) scales to large
test/assessments where human annotation would prove burdensome. We demonstrate
the efficacy of the proposed approach on two real educational datasets.
