Augmenting deep neural networks with symbolic knowledge: Towards trustworthy and interpretable AI for education

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown to be amongst the most important artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in educational applications, providing adaptive educational services. However, their educational potential is limited in practice due to three major challenges: i) difficulty in incorporating symbolic educational knowledge (e.g., causal relationships, and practitioners' knowledge) in their development, ii) learning and reflecting biases, and iii) lack of interpretability. Given the high-risk nature of education, the integration of educational knowledge into ANNs becomes crucial for developing AI applications that adhere to essential educational restrictions, and provide interpretability over the predictions. This research argues that the neural-symbolic family of AI has the potential to address the named challenges. To this end, it adapts a neural-symbolic AI framework and accordingly develops an approach called NSAI, that injects and extracts educational knowledge into and from deep neural networks, for modelling learners computational thinking. Our findings reveal that the NSAI approach has better generalizability compared to deep neural networks trained merely on training data, as well as training data augmented by SMOTE and autoencoder methods. More importantly, unlike the other models, the NSAI approach prioritises robust representations that capture causal relationships between input features and output labels, ensuring safety in learning to avoid spurious correlations and control biases in training data. Furthermore, the NSAI approach enables the extraction of rules from the learned network, facilitating interpretation and reasoning about the path to predictions, as well as refining the initial educational knowledge. These findings imply that neural-symbolic AI can overcome the limitations of ANNs in education, enabling trustworthy and interpretable applications.