HGKT: Introducing Hierarchical Exercise Graph for Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge tracing (KT) which aims at predicting learner's knowledge mastery plays an important role in the computer-aided educational system. In recent years, many deep learning models have been applied to tackle the KT task, which have shown promising results. However, limitations still exist. Most existing methods simplify the exercising records as knowledge sequences, which fail to explore rich information that existed in exercises. Besides, the existing diagnosis results of knowledge tracing are not convincing enough since they neglect prior relations between exercises. To solve the above problems, we propose a hierarchical graph knowledge tracing model called HGKT to explore the latent hierarchical relations between exercises. Specifically, we introduce the concept of problem schema to construct a hierarchical exercise graph that could model the exercise learning dependencies. Moreover, we employ two attention mechanisms to highlight the important historical states of learners. In the testing stage, we present a K&S diagnosis matrix that could trace the transition of mastery of knowledge and problem schema, which can be more easily applied to different applications. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and interpretability of our proposed models.