S-KMN: Integrating semantic features learning and knowledge mapping network for automatic quiz question annotation

Quiz question annotation aims to assign the most relevant knowledge point to a question, which is a key technology to support intelligent education applications. However, the existing methods only extract the explicit semantic information that reveals the literal meaning of a question, and ignore the implicit knowledge information that highlights the knowledge intention. To this end, an innovative dual-channel model, the Semantic-Knowledge Mapping Network (S-KMN) is proposed to enrich the question representation from two perspectives, semantic and knowledge, simultaneously. It integrates semantic features learning and knowledge mapping network (KMN) to extract explicit semantic features and implicit knowledge features of questions,respectively. Designing KMN to extract implicit knowledge features is the focus of this study. First, the context-aware and sequence information of knowledge attribute words in the question text is integrated into the knowledge attribute graph to form the knowledge representation of each question. Second, learning a projection matrix, which maps the knowledge representation to the latent knowledge space based on the scene base vectors, and the weighted summations of these base vectors serve as knowledge features. To enrich the question representation, an attention mechanism is introduced to fuse explicit semantic features and implicit knowledge features, which real-izes further cognitive processing on the basis of understanding semantics. The experimental results on 19,410 real-world physics quiz questions in 30 knowledge points demonstrate that the S-KMN outperforms the state-of-the-art text classification-based question annotation method. Comprehensive analysis and ablation studies validate the superiority of our model in selecting knowledge-specific features.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).