Improving Sensor-Free Affect Detection Using Deep Learning

Affect detection has become a prominent area in student modeling in the last decade and considerable progress has been made in developing effective models. Many of the most successful models have leveraged physical and physiological sensors to accomplish this. While successful, such systems are difficult to deploy at scale due to economic and political constraints, limiting the utility of their application. Examples of sensor-free affect detectors that assess students based solely using data on the interaction between students and computer-based learning platforms exist, but these detectors generally have not reached high enough levels of quality to justify their use in real-time interventions. However, the classification algorithms used in these previous sensor-free detectors have not taken full advantage of the newest methods emerging in the field. The use of deep learning algorithms, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), have been applied to a range of other domains including pattern recognition and natural language processing with success, but have only recently been attempted in educational contexts. In this work, we construct new deep sensor-free affect detectors and report significant improvements over previously reported models.