Prompt Tuning for Multi-Label Text Classification: How to Link Exercises to Knowledge Concepts?

Abstract

Exercises refer to the evaluation metric of whether students have mastered specific knowledge concepts. Linking exercises to knowledge concepts is an important foundation in multiple disciplines such as intelligent education, which represents the multi-label text classification problem in essence. However, most existing methods do not take the automatic linking of exercises to knowledge concepts into consideration. In addition, most of the widely used approaches in multi-label text classification require large amounts of training data for model optimization, which is usually time-consuming and labour-intensive in real-world scenarios. To address these problems, we propose a prompt tuning method for multi-label text classification, which can address the problem of the number of labelled exercises being small due to the lack of specialized expertise. Specifically, the relevance scores of exercise content and knowledge concepts are learned by a prompt tuning model with a unified template, and then the multiple associated knowledge concepts are selected with a threshold. An Exercises–Concepts dataset of the Data Structure course is constructed to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Extensive experimental results confirm our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines by up to 35.53% and 41.78% in Micro and Macro F1, respectively.