# BloomNet: A Robust Transformer based model for Bloom's Learning Outcome Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Text Classification Algorithms: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08067/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Based Text Classification: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03705/) (2020)
- [LESA: Linguistic Encapsulation and Semantic Amalgamation Based Generalised Claim Detection from Online Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11891/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Ethical Need for Watermarks in Machine-Generated Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03118/) (2022)
- [Evaluating and Improving Pedagogical Fit in LLM-Based AI Tutors with the Pedagogical Suitability Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05411/) (2026)
- [Evaluation of pre-trained models for pedagogical assessment of novel AI-assisted educational questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bloom taxonomy is a common paradigm for categorizing educational learning objectives into three learning levels: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. For the optimization of educational programs, it is crucial to design course learning outcomes (CLOs) according to the different cognitive levels of Bloom Taxonomy. Usually, administrators of the institutions manually complete the tedious work of mapping CLOs and examination questions to Bloom taxonomy levels. To address this issue, we propose a transformer-based model named BloomNet that captures linguistic as well semantic information to classify the course learning outcomes (CLOs). We compare BloomNet with a diverse set of basic as well as strong baselines and we observe that our model performs better than all the experimented baselines. Further, we also test the generalization capability of BloomNet by evaluating it on different distributions which our model does not encounter during training and we observe that our model is less susceptible to distribution shift compared to the other considered models. We support our findings by performing extensive result analysis. In ablation study we observe that on explicitly encapsulating the linguistic information along with semantic information improves the model on IID (independent and identically distributed) performance as well as OOD (out-of-distribution) generalization capability.