A Predictive Model for Student Performance in Classrooms Using Student Interactions With an eTextbook

With the rise of online eTextbooks and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a huge amount of data has been collected related to students' learning. With the careful analysis of this data, educators can gain useful insights into the performance of their students and their behavior in learning a particular topic. This paper proposes a new model for predicting student performance based on an analysis of how students interact with an interactive online eTextbook. By being able to predict students' performance early in the course, educators can easily identify students at risk and provide a suitable intervention. We considered two main issues the prediction of good/bad performance and the prediction of the final exam grade. To build the proposed model, we evaluated the most popular classification and regression algorithms on data from a data structures and algorithms course (CS2) offered in a large public research university. Random Forest Regression and Multiple Linear Regression have been applied in Regression. While Logistic Regression, decision tree, Random Forest Classifier, K Nearest Neighbors, and Support Vector Machine have been applied in classification.

Arabic aspect based sentiment analysis using bidirectional GRU based models

Aspect-based Sentiment analysis (ABSA) accomplishes a fine-grained analysis that defines the aspects of a given document or sentence and the sentiments conveyed regarding each aspect. This level of analysis is the most detailed version that is capable of exploring the nuanced viewpoints of the reviews. Most of the research available in ABSA focuses on English language with very few work available on Arabic. Most previous work in Arabic has been based on regular methods of machine learning that mainly depends on a group of rare resources and tools for analyzing and processing Arabic content such as lexicons, but the lack of those resources presents another challenge. To overcome these obstacles, Deep Learning (DL)-based methods are proposed using two models based on Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) neural networks for ABSA. The first one is a DL model that takes advantage of the representations on both words and characters via the combination of bidirectional GRU, Convolutional neural network (CNN), and Conditional Random Field (CRF) which makes up (BGRU-CNN-CRF) model to extract the main opinionated aspects (OTE). The second is an interactive attention network based on bidirectional GRU (IAN-BGRU) to identify sentiment polarity toward extracted aspects. We evaluated our models using the benchmarked Arabic hotel reviews dataset. The results indicate that the proposed methods are better than baseline research on both tasks having 38.5% enhancement in F1-score for opinion target extraction (T2) and 7.5% in accuracy for aspect-based sentiment polarity classification (T3). Obtaining F1 score of 69.44% for T2, and accuracy of 83.98% for T3.