# Automating Transfer Credit Assessment in Student Mobility -- A Natural Language Processing-based Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01955/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [Evolution of Semantic Similarity -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13820/) (2020)
- [SimVerb-3500: A Large-Scale Evaluation Set of Verb Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00869/) (2016)
- [TweetBERT: A Pretrained Language Representation Model for Twitter Text Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11091/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Student mobility or academic mobility involves students moving between institutions during their post-secondary education, and one of the challenging tasks in this process is to assess the transfer credits to be offered to the incoming student. In general, this process involves domain experts comparing the learning outcomes of the courses, to decide on offering transfer credits to the incoming students. This manual implementation is not only labor-intensive but also influenced by undue bias and administrative complexity. The proposed research article focuses on identifying a model that exploits the advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to effectively automate this process. Given the unique structure, domain specificity, and complexity of learning outcomes (LOs), a need for designing a tailor-made model arises. The proposed model uses a clustering-inspired methodology based on knowledge-based semantic similarity measures to assess the taxonomic similarity of LOs and a transformer-based semantic similarity model to assess the semantic similarity of the LOs. The similarity between LOs is further aggregated to form course to course similarity. Due to the lack of quality benchmark datasets, a new benchmark dataset containing seven course-to-course similarity measures is proposed. Understanding the inherent need for flexibility in the decision-making process the aggregation part of the model offers tunable parameters to accommodate different scenarios. While providing an efficient model to assess the similarity between courses with existing resources, this research work steers future research attempts to apply NLP in the field of articulation in an ideal direction by highlighting the persisting research gaps.