Title: A novel recommendation of learning items based on deep neural networks and trust relationships

Authors: Yamina Aissaoui; Lamia Berkani; Faiçal Azouaou

Addresses: Laboratoire des Méthodes de Conception des Systèmes, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique, 68M, 16309, Oued-Smar, Alger, Algeria ' Laboratoire de Recherche en Intelligence Artificielle (LRIA), Département d'Intelligence Artificielle & Sciences des Données, Faculté d'Informatique, USTHB, B.P. 32 Bab Ezzouar, 16111, Alger, Algeria ' Laboratoire des Méthodes de Conception des Systèmes, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique, 68M, 16309, Oued-Smar, Alger, Algéria

Abstract: With the rapid development of information technologies, online learning platforms have become the most convenient way for users(teachers and learners) to share their learning content. However, due to the increasing number of educational content, it becomes very difficult for learners to find the most appropriate items. Most previous methods focused on users' ratings to establish learner's profiles, while recent work has added users' comments. In this work we are interested on the usage of social learning networks and we propose a novel learning items recommendation approach through sentiment analysis. Two different deep neural network models (DNNs) have been used, namely: bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with their modified version, long short-term memory (LSTM). These models are based on the learners' data, including their favourite content and comments. To support learners in selecting learning resources, a list of trusted learners was developed using similarity between learners. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal, experiments have been conducted on two different datasets. The results we have obtained demonstrated that our approach outperforms the baselines and related work.

Keywords: social learning networks; social recommender system; trust; sentiment analysis; deep neural models; BERT; recurrent neural network; RNN; long short-term memory; LSTM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLT.2024.143969

International Journal of Learning Technology, 2024 Vol.19 No.4, pp.397 - 421

Received: 01 Dec 2022
Accepted: 07 Jun 2023
Published online: 16 Jan 2025 *

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