Does Deep Knowledge Tracing Learn Semantic Relations Between Knowledge Components?

arXiv:2611.16323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT) is a knowledge tracing (KT) model that updates a shared latent state from sequences of interactions, each pairing a knowledge component (KC) with a response. An interaction with one KC can therefore affect predictions for other KCs. We ask: Are the KC relations learned by DKT semantic? We construct text-derived semantic KC representations using nine pipelines to test whether the conclusions hold across alternative ways of constructing those representations. The first test compares DKT-derived KC relation graphs with semantic relation structures induced by pairwise cosine similarities among the KC representations. Across the evaluated datasets, embedding models, and pipelines, the two structures align only weakly and inconsistently. The second test introduces semantic information into DKT; the pretrained text-derived representations do not consistently outperform the standard DKT baseline. In the reduced-data experiments, semantic initialization yields a higher test area under the ROC curve (AUC) than the baseline at eight of nine nested sample sizes for ASSISTments 2017. KC-supervised fine-tuned BERT produces small positive AUC differences in some matched comparisons, but the study does not establish their stability across runs. These effects remain limited and inconsistent. The findings suggest that behavioral, temporal, structural, or psychometric signals may also shape DKT's learned relations. DKT-derived relations are not primarily semantic: the tested text-derived semantic structures do not strongly recover the DKT-derived relation structure.