Duolingo's use of spaced repetition

[Gwern Branwen]

Settles & Meeder 2016, "A Trainable Spaced Repetition Model for
Language Learning" http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P16/P16-1174.pdf

> We present half-life regression (HLR), a novel model for spaced repetition practice with applications to second language acquisition. HLR combines psycholinguistic theory with modern machine learning techniques, indirectly estimating the “half-life” of a word or concept in a student’s long-term memory. We use data from Duolingo — a popular online language learning application — to fit HLR models, reducing error by 45%+ compared to several baselines at predicting student recall rates. HLR model weights also shed light on which linguistic concepts are systematically challenging for second language learners. Finally, HLR was able to improve Duolingo daily student engagement by 12% in an operational user study.

Comparison to Leitner/Pimsleur, but nothing in the SuperMemo family.

Blog discussion: http://making.duolingo.com/how-we-learn-how-you-learn
Code/data: https://github.com/duolingo/halflife-regression

--
gwern
https://www.gwern.net

[Peter Bienstman]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing, I also picked this up from their blog.

They can do some cool things because they have lots of people learning the same cards, so they can establish relative difficulty averaged over lots of users.

For Mnemosyne, most people make their own cards, though, so that part we cannot take into account....

Cheers,

Peter

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mnemosyne-proj-u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mnemosyne-...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mnemosyne-proj-users/CAMwO0gyhpPX5w6-EiJP3vfU2GhCs8PD9xvqEdEZ2%3D7Xtuse8%3DA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.