@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-beyond-id,
title = "Beyond {ID} Embeddings: Process-Grounded Language Modeling for Cognitive Diagnosis",
author = "Liu, Minghang and
Wang, Yuanzhuo and
Qiu, Qiang and
Shen, Huawei and
Cheng, Xueqi",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1805/",
pages = "38576--38595",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs) play a pivotal role in personalized online learning. Traditional CDMs rely on discrete, ID-based embeddings to represent students, exercises, and concepts. This paradigm diverges from the nature of learner cognition, where knowledge is not stored and retrieved as isolated symbols. As a result, CDMs suffer from semantic limitations when new exercises or concepts appear. In this paper, we propose a Process-aware Language Cognitive Diagnosis (PLCD) framework that uses language-derived structures as cognitive priors and response records to calibrate student posterior states. PLCD leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct concept schemas and cognitive process graphs, and uses target-conditioned semantic memory to retrieve historical responses that are relevant to each target exercise. A process-grounded Language-to-Cognition Mapper with DA-MoE experts and process-level contrastive learning then maps the textual evidence into a unified cognitive space. Experimental results show that PLCD not only outperforms traditional baselines in predicting student performance but also exhibits strong cognitive transfer capabilities. These results connect the computational power of LLMs with the psychometric goal of measuring latent knowledge states, suggesting that structured language priors calibrated by response records can improve cold-start robustness and cognitive grounding."
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<abstract>Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs) play a pivotal role in personalized online learning. Traditional CDMs rely on discrete, ID-based embeddings to represent students, exercises, and concepts. This paradigm diverges from the nature of learner cognition, where knowledge is not stored and retrieved as isolated symbols. As a result, CDMs suffer from semantic limitations when new exercises or concepts appear. In this paper, we propose a Process-aware Language Cognitive Diagnosis (PLCD) framework that uses language-derived structures as cognitive priors and response records to calibrate student posterior states. PLCD leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct concept schemas and cognitive process graphs, and uses target-conditioned semantic memory to retrieve historical responses that are relevant to each target exercise. A process-grounded Language-to-Cognition Mapper with DA-MoE experts and process-level contrastive learning then maps the textual evidence into a unified cognitive space. Experimental results show that PLCD not only outperforms traditional baselines in predicting student performance but also exhibits strong cognitive transfer capabilities. These results connect the computational power of LLMs with the psychometric goal of measuring latent knowledge states, suggesting that structured language priors calibrated by response records can improve cold-start robustness and cognitive grounding.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Beyond ID Embeddings: Process-Grounded Language Modeling for Cognitive Diagnosis
%A Liu, Minghang
%A Wang, Yuanzhuo
%A Qiu, Qiang
%A Shen, Huawei
%A Cheng, Xueqi
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F liu-etal-2026-beyond-id
%X Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs) play a pivotal role in personalized online learning. Traditional CDMs rely on discrete, ID-based embeddings to represent students, exercises, and concepts. This paradigm diverges from the nature of learner cognition, where knowledge is not stored and retrieved as isolated symbols. As a result, CDMs suffer from semantic limitations when new exercises or concepts appear. In this paper, we propose a Process-aware Language Cognitive Diagnosis (PLCD) framework that uses language-derived structures as cognitive priors and response records to calibrate student posterior states. PLCD leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct concept schemas and cognitive process graphs, and uses target-conditioned semantic memory to retrieve historical responses that are relevant to each target exercise. A process-grounded Language-to-Cognition Mapper with DA-MoE experts and process-level contrastive learning then maps the textual evidence into a unified cognitive space. Experimental results show that PLCD not only outperforms traditional baselines in predicting student performance but also exhibits strong cognitive transfer capabilities. These results connect the computational power of LLMs with the psychometric goal of measuring latent knowledge states, suggesting that structured language priors calibrated by response records can improve cold-start robustness and cognitive grounding.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1805/
%P 38576-38595
Markdown (Informal)
[Beyond ID Embeddings: Process-Grounded Language Modeling for Cognitive Diagnosis](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1805/) (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
ACL