The Utilization of DistilBERT Features Space for Topics Suggestion in the Context of Learning Content

Recommender system is one of the popular topics in artificial intelligence fields as it can widely be used in the industry.Movies service provider, e-commerce, e-learning, and many other fields can utilize recommender system to give the personalization for the users. This research will try to use recommender system to provide the recommended topics that are suitable to each learning content. As part of developing the most suitable recommender system, this research will also focus on the data pre-processing,as the data is still raw and contains too much unused information yet. Text vectorization or the embedding process was conducted to the dataset using DistilBERT, pre-trained BERT model. After the vectorization, the recommender system used cosine similarity from the result to discover the largest cosine similarity, which was used to determine the recommendation. Based on the experiment, using cosine similarity could do the recommendation well enough by giving the appropriate topics recommendation based on the content. For example, given the content: “Chapter 2: Comments Chapter 2 of the book on C Programming”, the top 5 recommended topics were: “Objective-C”, “C++”, “MATLAB”,”VBA”, and “Perl”. Based on the results, it can be considered that the recommender system had performed as expected. However,it still had a lot of areas that could be improved for the future research, especially in the data preprocessing. Other text vectorization models can be considered to be used, such as: BERT Multilingual, RoBERTa, and SpanBERT. Other consideration is the content preparation that will be used as the input for the system. Combination of DistilBERT and cosine similarity as the recommender system can be considered to be implemented for other areas.