Bi-directional Mechanism for Recursion Algorithms: A Case Study on Gender Identification in MOOCs

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 challenging task, which is understudied in literature. Using syntactic features is still the state-of-the-art for gender identification in social media. Instead we propose here a novel approach based on Recursive Neural Networks (RecNN), to learn advanced syntactic knowledge extracted from learners’ comments, as an NLP-based predictor for their gender identity. We propose a bi-directional composition function, added to NLP state-of-the-art candidate RecNN models. We evaluate different combinations of semantic level encoding and syntactic level encoding functions, exploring their performances, with respect to the task of learner gender profiling in MOOCs