A hybrid E-learning recommendation integrating adaptive profiling and sentiment analysis

Abstract

This research proposes a novel framework named Enhanced e-Learning Hybrid Recommender System (ELHRS) that provides an appropriate e-content with the highest predicted ratings corresponding to the learner’s particular needs. To accomplish this, a new model is developed to deduce the Semantic Learner Profile automatically. It adaptively associates the learning patterns and rules depending on the learner’s behavior and the semantic relations computed in the semantic matrix that mutually links e-learning materials and terms. Here, a semantic-based approach for term expansion is introduced using DBpedia and WordNet ontologies. Further, various sentiment analysis models are proposed and incorporated as a part of the recommender system to predict ratings of e-learning resources from posted text reviews utilizing fine-grained sentiment classification on five discrete classes. Qualitative Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods with tailored-made Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are developed and evaluated on our customized dataset collected for a specific domain and a public dataset. Two improved language models are introduced depending on Skip-Gram (S-G) and Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) techniques. In addition, a robust language model based on hybridization of these couple of methods is developed to derive better vocabulary representation, yielding better accuracy 89.1% for the CNN-Three-Channel-Concatenation model. The suggested recommendation methodology depends on the learner’s preferences, other similar learners’ experience and background, deriving their opinions from the reviews towards the best learning resources. This assists the learners in finding the desired e-content at the proper time.