MRMLREC: A Two-Stage Approach for Addressing Data Sparsity in MOOC Video Recommendation (Student Abstract)

With the abundance of learning resources available on massive open online courses (MOOCs) platforms, the issue of interactive data sparsity has emerged as a significant challenge.This paper introduces MRMLREC, an efficient MOOC video recommendation which consists of two main stages: multi-relational representation and multi-level recommendation, aiming to solve the problem of data sparsity. In the multi-relational representation stage, MRMLREC adopts a tripartite approach, constructing relational graphs based on temporal sequences, courses-videos relation, and knowledge concepts-video relation. These graphs are processed by a Graph Convolution Network (GCN) and two variant Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to derive representations. A variant of the Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) then integrates these multi-dimensional data to enhance the overall representation. The multi-level recommendation stage introduces three prediction tasks at varying levels—courses, knowledge concepts, and videos—to mitigate data sparsity and improve the interpretability of video recommendations. Beam search (BS) is employed to identify top-β items at each level, refining the subsequent level's search space and enhancing recommendation efficiency. Additionally, an optional layer offers both personalization and diversification modes, ensuring variety in recommended videos and maintaining learner engagement. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MRMLREC on two real-world instances from Xuetang X.