English

Question-type Identification for Academic Questions in Online Learning Platform

Computation and Language 2022-11-28 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Online learning platforms provide learning materials and answers to students' academic questions by experts, peers, or systems. This paper explores question-type identification as a step in content understanding for an online learning platform. The aim of the question-type identifier is to categorize question types based on their structure and complexity, using the question text, subject, and structural features. We have defined twelve question-type classes, including Multiple-Choice Question (MCQ), essay, and others. We have compiled an internal dataset of students' questions and used a combination of weak-supervision techniques and manual annotation. We then trained a BERT-based ensemble model on this dataset and evaluated this model on a separate human-labeled test set. Our experiments yielded an F1-score of 0.94 for MCQ binary classification and promising results for 12-class multilabel classification. We deployed the model in our online learning platform as a crucial enabler for content understanding to enhance the student learning experience.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.13727,
  title  = {Question-type Identification for Academic Questions in Online Learning Platform},
  author = {Azam Rabiee and Alok Goel and Johnson D'Souza and Saurabh Khanwalkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.13727},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

18 pages, 6 figures, 4th International Conference on Semantic & Natural Language Processing (SNLP 2023)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:11:50.910Z