Fine-Tuning IndoBERT for Indonesian Exam Question Classification Based on Bloom's Taxonomy

Abstract

Background: The learning assessment of elementary schools has recently incorporated Bloom's Taxonomy, a structure in education that categorizes different levels of cognitive learning and thinking skills, as a fundamental framework. This assessment now includes High Order Thinking Skill (HOTS) questions, with a specific focus on Indonesian topics. The implementation of this system has been observed to require teachers to manually categorize or classify questions, and this process typically requires more time and resources. To address the associated difficulty, automated categorization and classification are required to streamline the process. However, despite various research efforts in questions classification, there is still room for improvement in terms of performance, particularly in precision and accuracy. Numerous investigations have explored the use of Deep Learning Natural Language Processing models such as BERT for classification, and IndoBERT is one such pre-trained model for text analysis. Objective: This research aims to build classification system that is capable of classifying Indonesian exam questions in multiple-choice form based on Bloom's Taxonomy using IndoBERT pre-trained model. Methods: The methodology used includes hyperparameter fine-tuning, which was carried out to identify the optimal model performance. This performance was subsequently evaluated based on accuracy, F1 Score, Precision, Recall, and the time required for the training and validation of the model. Results: The proposed Fine Tuned IndoBERT Model showed that the accuracy rate was 97%, 97% F1 Score, 97% Recall, and 98% Precision with an average training time per epoch of 1.55 seconds and an average validation time per epoch of 0.38 seconds. Conclusion: Fine Tuned IndoBERT model was observed to have a relatively high classification performance, and based on this observation, the system was considered capable of classifying Indonesian exam questions at the elementary school level. Keywords: IndoBERT, Fine Tuning, Indonesian Exam Question, Model Classifier, Natural Language Processing, Bloom’s Taxonomy