Cross-Lingual Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Novice Programming

Abstract

Student modeling sits at the epicenter of adaptive learning technology. In contrast to the voluminous work on student modeling for well-defined domains such as algebra, there has been little research on student modeling in programming (SMP) due to data scarcity caused by the unbounded solution spaces of open-ended programming exercises. In this work, we focus on two essential SMP tasks: program classification and early prediction of student success and propose a Cross-Lingual Adversarial Domain Adaptation (CrossLing) framework that can leverage a large programming dataset to learn features that can improve SMP's build using a much smaller dataset in a different programming language. Our framework maintains one globally invariant latent representation across both datasets via an adversarial learning process, as well as allocating domain-specific models for each dataset to extract local latent representations that cannot and should not be united. By separating globally-shared representations from domain-specific representations, our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for both SMP tasks.