In this paper, we present a new comparative study on automatic essay scoring (AES). The current state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) neural network architectures are used in this work to achieve above human-level accuracy on the publicly available Kaggle AES dataset. We compare two powerful language models, BERT and XLNet, and describe all the layers and network architectures in these models. We elucidate the network architectures of BERT and XLNet using clear notation and diagrams and explain the advantages of transformer architectures over traditional recurrent neural network architectures. Linear algebra notation is used to clarify the functions of transformers and attention mechanisms. We compare the results with more traditional methods, such as bag of words (BOW) and long short term memory (LSTM) networks.
Cross-prompt automated essay scoring (AES) requires the system to use non target-prompt essays to award scores to a target-prompt essay. Since obtaining a large quantity of pre-graded essays to a particular prompt is often difficult and unrealistic, the task of cross-prompt AES is vital for the development of real-world AES systems, yet it remains an under-explored area of research. Models designed for prompt-specific AES rely heavily on prompt-specific knowledge and perform poorly in the cross-prompt setting, whereas current approaches to cross-prompt AES either require a certain quantity of …
Kum Sung Middle School Number 2（金城第二中学）；KIM IL SUNG University（金日成大学）
Automated essay scoring plays an important role in judging students' language abilities in education. Traditional approaches use handcrafted features to score and are time-consuming and complicated. Recently, neural network approaches have improved performance without any feature engineering. Unlike other natural language processing tasks, only a small number of datasets are publicly available for automated essay scoring, and the size of the dataset is not sufficiently large. Considering that the performance of a neural network is closely related to the size of the dataset, the lack of data li…
Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been some work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays holistically using a multi-task learning (MTL) approach, where scoring the essay holistically is the primary task, and scoring the essay traits is the auxiliary task. We compare our results with a single-task learning (STL) approach, using both LSTMs and BiLSTMs. We also compare our results of the auxiliary task with such tasks done in other AEG systems. To find o…
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has been quite popular and is being widely used. However, lack of appropriate methodology for rating nonnative English speakers' essays has meant a lopsided advancement in this field. In this paper, we report initial results of our experiments with nonnative AES that learns from manual evaluation of nonnative essays. For this purpose, we conducted an exercise in which essays written by nonnative English speakers in test environment were rated both manually and by the automated system designed for the experiment. In the process, we experimented with a few features …
While automated essay scoring (AES) can reliably grade essays at scale, automated writing evaluation (AWE) additionally provides formative feedback to guide essay revision. However, a neural AES typically does not provide useful feature representations for supporting AWE. This paper presents a method for linking AWE and neural AES, by extracting Topical Components (TCs) representing evidence from a source text using the intermediate output of attention layers. We evaluate performance using a feature-based AES requiring TCs. Results show that performance is comparable whether using automaticall…
In this article, an automated system is proposed for essay scoring in Arabic language for online exams based on stemming techniques and Levenshtein edit operations. An online exam has been developed on the proposed mechanisms, exploiting the capabilities of light and heavy stemming. The implemented online grading system has shown to be an efficient tool for automated scoring of essay questions.
Cambium Assessment, Inc.（坎比姆评估公司）；University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a cross-disciplinary effort involving Education, Linguistics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The efficacy of an NLP model in AES tests it ability to evaluate long-term dependencies and extrapolate meaning even when text is poorly written. Large pretrained transformer-based language models have dominated the current state-of-the-art in many NLP tasks, however, the computational requirements of these models make them expensive to deploy in practice. The goal of this paper is to challenge the paradigm in NLP that bigger is better when it comes to AES. To d…
Automated essay scoring is one of the most important problem in Natural Language Processing. It has been explored for a number of years, and it remains partially solved. In addition to its economic and educational usefulness, it presents research problems. Transfer learning has proved to be beneficial in NLP. Data augmentation techniques have also helped build state-of-the-art models for automated essay scoring. Many works in the past have attempted to solve this problem by using RNNs, LSTMs, etc. This work examines the transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, etc. We empirically demonstrate the…
Tohoku University（东北大学）；Riken Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Existing approaches for automated essay scoring and document representation learning typically rely on discourse parsers to incorporate discourse structure into text representation. However, the performance of parsers is not always adequate, especially when they are used on noisy texts, such as student essays. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised pre-training approach to capture discourse structure of essays in terms of coherence and cohesion that does not require any discourse parser or annotation. We introduce several types of token, sentence and paragraph-level corruption techniques fo…
TransGAT: Transformer-Based Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Dimensional Automated Essay Scoring
Department of Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University（计算机科学系，国王阿卜杜勒阿齐兹大学）；English Language Institute, King Abdulaziz University（英语语言学院，国王阿卜杜勒阿齐兹大学）
An important step towards enabling English language learners to improve their conversational speaking proficiency involves automated scoring of multiple aspects of interactional competence and subsequent targeted feedback. This paper builds on previous work in this direction to investigate multiple neural architectures -- recurrent, attention and memory based -- along with feature-engineered models for the automated scoring of interactional and topic development aspects of text dialog data. We conducted experiments on a conversational database of text dialogs from human learners interacting wi…
LAIX Inc.（流利说公司）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Learning and Cognitive Science（上海学习与认知科学人工智能重点实验室）
In recent years, pre-trained models have become dominant in most natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, in the area of Automated Essay Scoring (AES), pre-trained models such as BERT have not been properly used to outperform other deep learning models such as LSTM. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-scale essay representation for BERT that can be jointly learned. We also employ multiple losses and transfer learning from out-of-domain essays to further improve the performance. Experiment results show that our approach derives much benefit from joint learning of multi-scale essa…
In this work, we present an approach based on combining string kernels and word embeddings for automatic essay scoring. String kernels capture the similarity among strings based on counting common character n-grams, which are a low-level yet powerful type of feature, demonstrating state-of-the-art results in various text classification tasks such as Arabic dialect identification or native language identification. To our best knowledge, we are the first to apply string kernels to automatically score essays. We are also the first to combine them with a high-level semantic feature representation,…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The ALTA Institute（ALTA研究所）
We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art approaches to Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are not well-suited to capturing adversarially crafted input of grammatical but incoherent sequences of sentences. We develop a neural model of local coherence that can effectively learn connectedness features between sentences, and propose a framework for integrating and jointly training the local coherence model with a state-of-the-art AES model. We evaluate our approach against a number of baselines and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness on both the AES task and the task of flagging adversaria…
Fopure (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd.（福珀（杭州）科技有限公司）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Current state-of-art feature-engineered and end-to-end Automated Essay Score (AES) methods are proven to be unable to detect adversarial samples, e.g. the essays composed of permuted sentences and the prompt-irrelevant essays. Focusing on the problem, we develop a Two-Stage Learning Framework (TSLF) which integrates the advantages of both feature-engineered and end-to-end AES models. In experiments, we compare TSLF against a number of strong baselines, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our models. TSLF surpasses all the baselines on five-eighths of prompts and ach…
Unleashing Large Language Models' Proficiency in Zero-shot Essay Scoring
National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University（北京大学多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）
EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Beijing Future Brain Education Technology Co., Ltd.（北京未来脑教育科技有限公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Big Data Research Institute（广西壮族自治区大数据研究院）
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）
In the prompt-specific holistic score prediction task for Automatic Essay Scoring, the general approaches include pre-trained neural model, coherence model, and hybrid model that incorporate syntactic features with neural model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extract and represent essay coherence features with prompt-learning NSP that shows to match the state-of-the-art AES coherence model, and achieves the best performance for long essays. We apply syntactic feature dense embedding to augment BERT-based model and achieve the best performance for hybrid methodology for AES. In a…
