Using deep learning to analyze the psychological effects of COVID-19 (2023)
Journal Article
Almeqren, M. A., Almegren, M., Alhayan, F., Cristea, A. I., & Pennington, D. R. (2023). Using deep learning to analyze the psychological effects of COVID-19. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 962854. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.962854

Problem: Sentiment Analysis (SA) automates the classification of the sentiment of people’s attitudes, feelings or reviews employing natural language processing (NLP) and computational approaches. Deep learning has recently demonstrated remarkable suc... Read More about Using deep learning to analyze the psychological effects of COVID-19.

The engage taxonomy: SDT-based measurable engagement indicators for MOOCs and their evaluation (2023)
Journal Article
Cristea, A. I., Alamri, A., Alshehri, M., Dwan Pereira, F., Toda, A. M., Harada T. de Oliveira, E., & Stewart, C. (2023). The engage taxonomy: SDT-based measurable engagement indicators for MOOCs and their evaluation. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-023-09374-x

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) platforms are considered a distinctive way to deliver a modern educational experience, open to a worldwide public. However, student engagement in MOOCs is a less explored area, although it is known that MOOCs suffer... Read More about The engage taxonomy: SDT-based measurable engagement indicators for MOOCs and their evaluation.

Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation (2023)
Journal Article
Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., Harit, A., Sun, Z., Aduragba, O. T., Shi, L., & Al Moubayed, N. (2023). Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation. AI open, 4, 19-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2023.05.001

This paper explores deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation, where the missing target pair for unlabelled data is modelled as a latent paraphrase sequence. We present a novel unsupervised model named variational sequence... Read More about Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation.

PICA-PICA: Exploring a Customisable Smart STEAM Educational Approach via a Smooth Combination of Programming, Engineering and Art (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Nagai, T., Klem, S., Kayama, M., Asuke, T., Meccawy, M., Wang, J., …Shi, L. (2023). PICA-PICA: Exploring a Customisable Smart STEAM Educational Approach via a Smooth Combination of Programming, Engineering and Art. . https://doi.org/10.1109/educon54358.2023.10125184

The STEAM approach in education has been gaining increasing popularity over the last decade. This is due to its potential in enhancing students' learning, when teaching arts and scientific disciplines together. This paper introduces the PICA-PICA con... Read More about PICA-PICA: Exploring a Customisable Smart STEAM Educational Approach via a Smooth Combination of Programming, Engineering and Art.

Toward Supporting CS1 Instructors and Learners With Fine-Grained Topic Detection in Online Judges (2023)
Journal Article
Pereira, F. D., Fonseca, S. C., Wiktor, S., Oliveira, D. B., Cristea, A. I., Benedict, A., …Oliveira, E. H. (2023). Toward Supporting CS1 Instructors and Learners With Fine-Grained Topic Detection in Online Judges. IEEE Access, 11, https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2023.3247189

Online judges (OJ) are a popular tool to support programming learning. However, one major issue with OJs is that problems are often put together without any associated meta-information that could, for example, be used to help classify problems. This... Read More about Toward Supporting CS1 Instructors and Learners With Fine-Grained Topic Detection in Online Judges.

Improving Health Mention Classification through Emphasising Literal Meanings: a Study Towards Diversity and Generalisation for Public Health Surveillance (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Aduragba, T. O., Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., & Long, Y. (in press). Improving Health Mention Classification through Emphasising Literal Meanings: a Study Towards Diversity and Generalisation for Public Health Surveillance.

How Personalization Affects Motivation in Gamified Review Assessments (2023)
Journal Article
Rodrigues, L., Palomino, P. T., Toda, A. M., Klock, A. C., Pessoa, M., Pereira, F. D., …Isotani, S. (2023). How Personalization Affects Motivation in Gamified Review Assessments. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-022-00326-x

Personalized gamification aims to address shortcomings of the one-size-fits-all (OSFA) approach in improving students’ motivations throughout the learning process. However, studies still focus on personalizing to a single user dimension, ignoring mul... Read More about How Personalization Affects Motivation in Gamified Review Assessments.

Is Unimodal Bias Always Bad for Visual Question Answering? A Medical Domain Study with Dynamic Attention (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Sun, Z., Harit, A., Cristea, A. I., Yu, J., Al Moubayed, N., & Shi, L. (2022). Is Unimodal Bias Always Bad for Visual Question Answering? A Medical Domain Study with Dynamic Attention. . https://doi.org/10.1109/bigdata55660.2022.10020791

Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is to answer medical questions based on clinical images provided. This field is still in its infancy due to the complexity of the trio formed of questions, multimodal features and expert knowledge. In this... Read More about Is Unimodal Bias Always Bad for Visual Question Answering? A Medical Domain Study with Dynamic Attention.

Hybrid Weighted Retrieval of Twitter Users for Temporally Relevant Full-Text Querying in the Media Industry (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Hodgson, R., Wang, J., Cristea, A. I., & Graham, J. (2022). Hybrid Weighted Retrieval of Twitter Users for Temporally Relevant Full-Text Querying in the Media Industry. . https://doi.org/10.1109/iiai-aai-winter58034.2022.00018

Barriers to the delivery of journalistic content to suitable media outlets present difficulties to both journalists and publishing houses. These may take the form of barriers to the identification of key individuals to whom the content is relevant, a... Read More about Hybrid Weighted Retrieval of Twitter Users for Temporally Relevant Full-Text Querying in the Media Industry.

INTERACTION: A Generative XAI Framework for Natural Language Inference Explanations (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., Harit, A., Sun, Z., Aduragba, O. T., Shi, L., & Al Moubayed, N. (2022). INTERACTION: A Generative XAI Framework for Natural Language Inference Explanations. . https://doi.org/10.1109/ijcnn55064.2022.9892336

XAI with natural language processing aims to produce human-readable explanations as evidence for AI decisionmaking, which addresses explainability and transparency. However, from an HCI perspective, the current approaches only focus on delivering a s... Read More about INTERACTION: A Generative XAI Framework for Natural Language Inference Explanations.

Efficient Uncertainty Quantification for Multilabel Text Classification (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., Harit, A., Sun, Z., Aduragba, O. T., Shi, L., & Al Moubayed, N. (2022). Efficient Uncertainty Quantification for Multilabel Text Classification. . https://doi.org/10.1109/ijcnn55064.2022.9892871

Despite rapid advances of modern artificial intelligence (AI), there is a growing concern regarding its capacity to be explainable, transparent, and accountable. One crucial step towards such AI systems involves reliable and efficient uncertainty qua... Read More about Efficient Uncertainty Quantification for Multilabel Text Classification.

Contrastive Learning with Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks on Short Text Classification (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Sun, Z., Harit, A., Cristea, A. I., Yu, J., Shi, L., & Al Moubayed, N. (2022). Contrastive Learning with Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks on Short Text Classification. . https://doi.org/10.1109/ijcnn55064.2022.9892257

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted extensive interest in text classification tasks due to their expected superior performance in representation learning. However, most existing studies adopted the same semi-supervised learning setting as the... Read More about Contrastive Learning with Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks on Short Text Classification.

Adopting Automatic Machine Learning for Temporal Prediction of Paid Certification in MOOCs (2022)
Book Chapter
Alshehri, M., Alamri, A., & Cristea, A. I. (2022). Adopting Automatic Machine Learning for Temporal Prediction of Paid Certification in MOOCs. In M. Mercedes Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education (717-723). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11644-5_73

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms have been growing exponentially, offering worldwide low-cost educational content. Recent literature on MOOC learner analytics has been carried out around predicting either students’ dropout, academic perfor... Read More about Adopting Automatic Machine Learning for Temporal Prediction of Paid Certification in MOOCs.

Fine-grained Main Ideas Extraction and Clustering of Online Course Reviews (2022)
Book Chapter
Xiao, C., Shi, L., Cristea, A., Li, Z., & Pan, Z. (2022). Fine-grained Main Ideas Extraction and Clustering of Online Course Reviews. In M. Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education (294-306). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11644-5_24

Online course reviews have been an essential way in which course providers could get insights into students’ perceptions about the course quality, especially in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs), where it is hard for both parties to... Read More about Fine-grained Main Ideas Extraction and Clustering of Online Course Reviews.

Balancing Fined-Tuned Machine Learning Models Between Continuous and Discrete Variables - A Comprehensive Analysis Using Educational Data (2022)
Book Chapter
Drousiotis, E., Pentaliotis, P., Shi, L., & Cristea, A. I. (2022). Balancing Fined-Tuned Machine Learning Models Between Continuous and Discrete Variables - A Comprehensive Analysis Using Educational Data. In Artificial Intelligence in Education (256-268). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11644-5_21

Along with the exponential increase of students enrolling in MOOCs [26] arises the problem of a high student dropout rate. Researchers worldwide are interested in predicting whether students will drop out of MOOCs to prevent it. This study explores a... Read More about Balancing Fined-Tuned Machine Learning Models Between Continuous and Discrete Variables - A Comprehensive Analysis Using Educational Data.

A Good Classifier is Not Enough: A XAI Approach for Urgent Instructor-Intervention Models in MOOCs (2022)
Book Chapter
Alrajhi, L., Pereira, F. D., Cristea, A. I., & Aljohani, T. (2022). A Good Classifier is Not Enough: A XAI Approach for Urgent Instructor-Intervention Models in MOOCs. In M. Mercedes Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium (424-427). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_84

Deciding upon instructor intervention based on learners’ comments that need an urgent response in MOOC environments is a known challenge. The best solutions proposed used automatic machine learning (ML) models to predict the urgency. These are ‘black... Read More about A Good Classifier is Not Enough: A XAI Approach for Urgent Instructor-Intervention Models in MOOCs.

An AI-Based Feedback Visualisation System for Speech Training (2022)
Book Chapter
Wynn, A. T., Wang, J., Umezawa, K., & Cristea, A. I. (2022). An AI-Based Feedback Visualisation System for Speech Training. In M. Mercedes Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium (510-514). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_104

This paper proposes providing automatic feedback to support public speech training. For the first time, speech feedback is provided on a visual dashboard including not only the transcription and pitch information, but also emotion information. A meth... Read More about An AI-Based Feedback Visualisation System for Speech Training.

MOOCs Paid Certification Prediction Using Students Discussion Forums (2022)
Book Chapter
Alshehri, M., & Cristea, A. I. (2022). MOOCs Paid Certification Prediction Using Students Discussion Forums. In M. Mercedes Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium (542-545). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_111

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been suffering a very level of low course certification (less than 1% of the total number of enrolled students on a given online course opt to purchase its certificate), although MOOC platforms have been offer... Read More about MOOCs Paid Certification Prediction Using Students Discussion Forums.

Bi-directional Mechanism for Recursion Algorithms: A Case Study on Gender Identification in MOOCs (2022)
Book Chapter
Aljohani, T., Cristea, A. I., & Alrajhi, L. (2022). Bi-directional Mechanism for Recursion Algorithms: A Case Study on Gender Identification in MOOCs. In M. Mercedes Rodrigo, N. Matsuda, A. I. Cristea, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium (396-399). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_78

Automatically identifying the learner gender, which serves as this paper’s focus, can provide valuable information to personalised learners’ experiences in MOOCs. However, extracting the gender from learner-generated data (discussion forum) is a chal... Read More about Bi-directional Mechanism for Recursion Algorithms: A Case Study on Gender Identification in MOOCs.

SimStu-Transformer: A Transformer-Based Approach to Simulating Student Behaviour (2022)
Book Chapter
Li, Z., Shi, L., Cristea, A., Zhou, Y., Xiao, C., & Pan, Z. (2022). SimStu-Transformer: A Transformer-Based Approach to Simulating Student Behaviour. In Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners’ and Doctoral Consortium (348-351). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11647-6_67

Lacking behavioural data between students and an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) has been an obstacle for improving its personalisation capability. One feasible solution is to train “sim students”, who simulate real students’ behaviour in the ITS.... Read More about SimStu-Transformer: A Transformer-Based Approach to Simulating Student Behaviour.