Mitigating Cold-Start Problems in Knowledge Tracing with Large Language Models: an Attribute-aware Approach

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a crucial research task for dynamically monitoring students' knowledge states, particularly in online education systems. Recently, knowledge tracing has gained significant attention and in-depth research. Most existing methods rely on students' response data for question understanding and modeling, which helps better updating students' knowledge states. Meanwhile, question ID is utilized to indicate and represent questions. However, this presents a challenge when transitioning to new, cold-start questions that few students has answered before. Also, prior work has overlooked the semantic modeling of questions, which could better assist in modeling the transfer of students' knowledge states. In this paper, we explore leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to help understand questions for knowledge tracing, which benefits mitigating cold-start and sparse problems and modeling the transfer of students' knowledge states in a sophisticated manner. Specifically, we first design an attribute estimation module to estimate the attribute of the questions (e.g., difficulty, ability requirements, expected response time) by prompting Large Language Models. Subsequently, we have developed a question embedding module that incorporates graph attention network to effectively utilizing these attributes. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models and effectively addresses the problems of cold-start and sparsity. In addition, due to the estimation of multiple attributes of the questions, our model exhibits superior interpretability.