Sergio Moreno-Álvarez


2024

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UNED team at BEA 2024 Shared Task: Testing different Input Formats for predicting Item Difficulty and Response Time in Medical Exams
Alvaro Rodrigo | Sergio Moreno-Álvarez | Anselmo Peñas
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)

This paper presents the description and primary outcomes of our team’s participation in the BEA 2024 shared task. Our primary exploration involved employing transformer-based systems, particularly BERT models, due to their suitability for Natural Language Processing tasks and efficiency with computational resources. We experimented with various input formats, including concatenating all text elements and incorporating only the clinical case. Surprisingly, our results revealed different impacts on predicting difficulty versus response time, with the former favoring clinical text only and the latter benefiting from including the correct answer. Despite moderate performance in difficulty prediction, our models excelled in response time prediction, ranking highest among all participants. This study lays the groundwork for future investigations into more complex approaches and configurations, aiming to advance the automatic prediction of exam difficulty and response time.