Automatic generation of meta-path graph for concept recommendation in MOOCs

Abstract

In MOOCs, generally speaking, curriculum designing, course selection, and knowledge concept recommendation are the three major steps that systematically instruct users to learn. This paper focuses on the knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs, which recommends related topics to users to facilitate their online study. The existing approaches only consider the historical behaviors of users, but ignore various kinds of auxiliary information, which are also critical for user embedding. In addition, traditional recommendation models only consider the immediate user response to the recommended items, and do not explicitly consider the long-term interests of users. To deal with the above issues, this paper proposes AGMKRec, a novel reinforced concept recommendation model with a heterogeneous information network. We first clarify the concept recommendation in MOOCs as a reinforcement learning problem to offer a personalized and dynamic knowledge concept label list to users. To consider more auxiliary information of users, we construct a heterogeneous information network among users, courses, and concepts, and use a meta-path-based method which can automatically identify useful meta-paths and multi-hop connections to learn a new graph structure for learning effective node representations on a graph. Comprehensive experiments and analyses on a real-world dataset collected from XuetangX show that our proposed model outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.