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# aifeducation <a href="https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/"><img src="https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/logo.png" alt="aifeducation website" align="right" height="120"/></a>

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The R package *Artificial Intelligence for Education (aifeducation)* is
designed for the special requirements of educators, educational
researchers, and social researchers. The target audience of this package
are educators and researchers with no coding skills who would like to
develop their own models, as well as people who would like to use those
models created by other researchers/educators. The package supports the
application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Natural Language
Processing tasks such as text embedding and classification under the
special conditions of the educational and social sciences.

## Features Overview

- Simple usage of artificial intelligence by providing routines for the
  most important tasks of educators and researchers from social and
  educational sciences.
- Provides a graphical user interface (AI for Education - Studio),
  allowing users to work with AI without the need for coding skills.
- Supports ‘PyTorch’ as the core machine learning framework which is
  widely used in research.
- Implements the advantages of the python library ‘datasets’, increasing
  computational speed and allowing the use of very large data sets.
- Uses safetensors for saving models in ‘PyTorch’.
- Supports pre-trained language models from Hugging Face.
- Supports ModernBERT, MPNet, BERT, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and Funnel
  Transformer for creating context-sensitive text embeddings.
- Makes sharing pre-trained models very easy.
- Integrates sustainability tracking for training and inference.
- Integrates an approach to calculate FLOPS based on model’s
  architecture.
- Integrates special statistical techniques for dealing with data
  structures common in the social and educational sciences.
- Supports the classification of long text documents.

Currently, the package focuses on classification tasks which can either
be used to diagnose characteristics of learners from written material or
to estimate the properties of learning and teaching material. In the
future, more tasks will be implemented.

## Installation

You can install the latest stable version of the package from CRAN with:

``` r
install.packages("aifeducation")
```

You can install the development version of *aifeducation* from
[GitHub](https://github.com/) with:

``` r
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github(repo="FBerding/aifeducation",
                         ref="master",
                         dependencies = "Imports")
```

Further instructions for installation can be found in vignette [01 Get
Started](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/aifeducation.html).

> Please note that an update of your version of *aifeducation* may
> require an update of your python libraries. Refer to [01 Get
> Started](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/aifeducation.html)
> for more details.

## Graphical User Interface *AI for Education - Studio*

The package ships with a shiny app that serves as a graphical user
interface.

<figure>
<img src="https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/home.png"
style="width:100.0%" alt="Figure 1: Aifeducation Studio" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Figure 1: Aifeducation
Studio</figcaption>
</figure>

*AI for Education - Studio* allows users to easily develop, train,
apply, document, and analyse AI models without any coding skills. See
the corresponding vignette for more details: [02 Using the graphical
user interface Aifeducation -
Studio](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/gui_aife_studio.html).

## Sustainability

Training AI models consumes time and energy. To help researchers
estimate the ecological impact of their work, a sustainability tracker
is implemented. It is based on the python library ‘codecarbon’ by Courty
et al. (2023). This tracker allows to estimate the energy consumption
for CPUs, GPUs and RAM during training and derives a value for CO2
emission. This value is based on the energy mix in the country where the
computer is located.

## PyTorch as Machine Learning Framework

The core machine learning framework of this package is ‘PyTorch’,
providing a broad support of graphical devices to accelerate
computations, access to new and unique model architectures, and a high
compatibility of models across different versions of this machine
learning framework.

## Model Life Cycle

Research requires reproducibility and traceability. Thus, starting with
version 1.0.0 of this package, it has top priority to ensure that
already trained models work with future versions of this package.

## Classification Tasks

### Transforming Texts into Numbers

Classification tasks require the transformation of raw texts into a
representation with numbers. For this step, *aifeducation* supports new
approaches such as modernBERT (Warner et al. 2024), MPNet (Song et
al. 2020), BERT (Devlin et al. 2019), RoBERTa (Liu et al. 2019), and
Funnel-Transformer (Dai et al. 2020).

*aifeducation* supports the use of pre-trained transformer models
provided by [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/) and the creation of
new transformers, allowing educators and researchers to develop
specialized and domain-specific models. See [04 Model configuration and
training](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/model_configuration.html)
for details about the configuration of a new model.

The package supports the analysis of long texts. Depending on the
method, long texts are transformed into vectors at once, or, if too
long, are split into several chunks which results in a sequence of
vectors.

### Training AI under Challenging Conditions

For the second step within a classification task, *aifeducation*
integrates some important statistical and mathematical methods for
dealing with the main challenges in educational and social sciences for
applying AI. These are:

- **digital data availability:** In the educational and social sciences,
  data is often only available in handwritten form. For example, in
  schools or universities, students often solve tasks by creating
  handwritten documents. Thus, educators and researchers first have to
  transform analogue data into a digital form, involving human action.
  This makes data generation expensive and time-consuming, leading to
  *small data sets*.
- **high privacy policy standards:** Furthermore, in the educational and
  social sciences, data often refers to humans and/or their actions.
  These kinds of data are protected by privacy policies in many
  countries, limiting access to and the usage of data, which also
  results in *small data sets*.
- **long research tradition:** Educational and social sciences have a
  long research tradition in generating insights into social phenomena
  as well as learning and teaching. These insights have to be
  incorporated into applications of AI (e.g., Luan et al. 2020; Wong et
  al. 2019). This makes supervised machine learning a very important
  technology since it provides a link between educational and social
  theories or models on the one hand and machine learning on the other
  hand (Berding et al. 2022). However, this kind of machine learning
  requires humans to generate a valid data set for the training process,
  leading to *small data sets*.
- **complex constructs:** Compared to classification tasks where, for
  instance, AI has to differentiate between a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ movie
  review, constructs in the educational and social sciences are more
  complex. For example, some research instruments in motivational
  psychology require to infer personal motifs from written essays (e.g.,
  Gruber & Kreuzpointner 2013). A reliable and valid interpretation of
  this kind of information requires well qualified human raters, making
  data generation expensive. This also *limits the size of a data set*.
- **imbalanced data:** Finally, data in the educational and social
  sciences often occurs in an imbalanced pattern as several empirical
  studies show (Bloemen 2011; Stütz et al. 2022). Imbalanced means that
  some categories or characteristics of a data set have very high
  absolute frequencies compared to other categories and characteristics.
  Imbalance during AI training guides algorithms to focus and prioritize
  the categories and characteristics with high absolute frequencies,
  increasing the risk to miss categories/characteristics with low
  frequencies (Haixiang et al. 2017). This can lead AI to prefer special
  groups of people/material, imply false recommendations and
  conclusions, or to miss rare categories or characteristics.

In order to deal with the problem of imbalanced data sets, the package
integrates the *Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique* into the
learning process. Currently, the *K-Nearest Neighbor OveRsampling
Approach (KNNOR)* developed by Islam et al. (2022) is available in fast
C++. This approach reached high performance across different tasks and
data sets compared to other techniques (Islam et al. 2022).

In order to address the problem of small data sets, training loops of AI
integrate *pseudo-labeling* (e.g., Lee 2013). Pseudo-labeling is a
technique which can be used for supervised learning. More specifically,
educators and researchers rate a part of a data set and train AI with
this very part. The remainder of the data is not processed by humans.
Instead, AI uses this part of data to learn on its own. Thus, educators
and researchers only have to provide additional data for the AI’s
learning process without coding it themselves. This offers the
possibility to add more data to the training process and reduce labor
cost.

### Evaluating Performance

Classification tasks in machine learning are comparable to the empirical
method of *content analysis* from the social sciences. This method looks
back on a long research tradition and an ongoing discussion on how to
evaluate the reliability and validity of generated data. In order to
provide a link to this research tradition and to provide educators as
well as educational and social researchers with performance measures
they are more familiar with, every AI trained with this package is
evaluated with the following measures and concepts:

- Iota Concept of the Second Generation (Berding & Pargmann 2022).
- Krippendorff’s Alpha (Krippendorff 2019).
- Percentage Agreement.
- Gwet’s AC1/AC2 (Gwet 2014).
- Kendall’s coefficient of concordance W.
- Cohen’s Kappa unweighted (Cohen 1960).
- Cohen’s Kappa with equal weights (Cohen 1968).
- Cohen’s Kappa with squared weights (Cohen 1968).
- Fleiss’ Kappa for multiple raters without exact estimation (Fleiss
  1971).

In addition, some traditional measures from machine learning literature
are also available:

- Precision
- Recall
- F1-Score

## Sharing Trained AI

Since the package is based on ‘PyTorch’ and the transformer library,
every trained AI can be shared with other educators and researchers. The
package supports an easy use of pre-trained AI within *R*, but also
provides the possibility to export trained AI to other environments.

Using a pre-trained AI for classification only requires the classifier
and the corresponding text embedding model. Use *AI for Education
Studio* or just load both to *R* and start predictions. Vignette [02
Using the graphical user interface Aifeducation -
Studio](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/gui_aife_studio.html)
describes how to use the user interface. Vignette [03 Using R
syntax](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/classification_tasks.html)
describes how to save and load the objects with *R* syntax. In vignette
[05 Sharing and Using Trained
AI/Models](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/sharing_and_publishing.html)
you can find a detailed guide on how to document and share your models.

## Tutorial and Guides

- [01 Get
  Started](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/aifeducation.html):
  Installation and configuration of the package.
- [02 Using the graphical user interface Aifeducation -
  Studio](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/gui_aife_studio.html):
  Introduction graphical user interface *Aifeducation Studio*.
- [03 Using R
  syntax](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/classification_tasks.html):
  A short introduction into using the package with *R* syntax with
  examples for classification tasks.
- [04 Model configuration and
  training](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/model_configuration.html):
  Summary of some studies for finding a good configuration for a model.
- [05 Sharing and Using Trained
  AI/Models](https://fberding.github.io/aifeducation/articles/sharing_and_publishing.html):
  Guidance on how to share models.

## References

Berding, F., & Pargmann, J. (2022). Iota Reliability Concept of the
Second Generation. Berlin: Logos. <https://doi.org/10.30819/5581>

Berding, F., Riebenbauer, E., Stütz, S., Jahncke, H., Slopinski, A., &
Rebmann, K. (2022). Performance and Configuration of Artificial
Intelligence in Educational Settings.: Introducing a New Reliability
Concept Based on Content Analysis. Frontiers in Education, 1-21.
<https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.818365>

Bloemen, A. (2011). Lernaufgaben in Schulbüchern der Wirtschaftslehre:
Analyse, Konstruktion und Evaluation von Lernaufgaben für die Lernfelder
industrieller Geschäftsprozesse. Hampp.

Cohen, J (1968). Weighted kappa: Nominal scale agreement with provision
for scaled disagreement or partial credit. Psychological Bulletin,
70(4), 213–220. <https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026256>

Cohen, J (1960). A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales.
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37–46.
<https://doi.org/10.1177/001316446002000104>

Courty, B., Schmidt, V., Goyal-Kamal, Coutarel, M., Feld, B., Lecourt,
J., & … (2023). mlco2/codecarbon: v2.2.7.
<https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8181237>

Dai, Z., Lai, G., Yang, Y. & Le, Q. V. (2020). Funnel-Transformer:
Filtering out Sequential Redundancy for Efficient Language Processing.
<https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2006.03236>

Devlin, J., Chang, M.‑W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT:
Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language
Understanding. In J. Burstein, C. Doran, & T. Solorio (Eds.),
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North (pp. 4171–4186).
Association for Computational Linguistics.
<https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423>

Fleiss, J. L. (1971). Measuring nominal scale agreement among many
raters. Psychological Bulletin, 76(5), 378–382.
<https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031619>

Gruber, N., & Kreuzpointner, L. (2013). Measuring the reliability of
picture story exercises like the TAT. PloS One, 8(11), e79450.
<https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079450>

Gwet, K. L. (2014). Handbook of inter-rater reliability: The definitive
guide to measuring the extent of agreement among raters (Fourth
edition). STATAXIS.

Haixiang, G., Yijing, L., Shang, J., Mingyun, G., Yuanyue, H., & Bing,
G. (2017). Learning from class-imbalanced data: Review of methods and
applications. Expert Systems with Applications, 73, 220–239.
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2016.12.035>

He, P., Liu, X., Gao, J. & Chen, W. (2020). DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced
BERT with Disentangled Attention.
<https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2006.03654>

Islam, A., Belhaouari, S. B., Rehman, A. U. & Bensmail, H. (2022).
KNNOR: An oversampling technique for imbalanced datasets. Applied Soft
Computing, 115, 108288. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2021.108288>

Krippendorff, K. (2019). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its
Methodology (4th Ed.). SAGE.

Lee, D.‑H. (2013). Pseudo-Label: The Simple and Efficient
Semi-Supervised Learning Method for Deep Neural Networks. CML 2013
Workshop: Challenges in Representation Learning.

Liu, Y., Ott, M., Goyal, N., Du, J., Joshi, M., Chen, D., Levy, O.,
Lewis, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Stoyanov, V. (2019). RoBERTa: A Robustly
Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach.
<https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1907.11692>

Luan, H., Geczy, P., Lai, H., Gobert, J., Yang, S. J. H., Ogata, H.,
Baltes, J., Guerra, R., Li, P., & Tsai, C.‑C. (2020). Challenges and
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Song, K., Tan, X., Qin, T., Lu, J. & Liu, T.‑Y. (2020). MPNet: Masked
and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding.
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Stütz, S., Berding, F., Reincke, S., & Scheper, L. (2022).
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Warner, B., Chaffin, A., Clavié, B., Weller, O., Hallström, O.,
Taghadouini, S., Gallagher, A., Biswas, R., Ladhak, F., Aarsen, T.,
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<https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.13663>

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