DOCSLIB.ORG

Automatic Essay Scoring of Swedish Essays Using Neural Networks

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Automatic Essay Scoring of Swedish Essays Using Neural Networks Automatic Essay Scoring of Swedish Essays using Neural Networks By Mathias Lilja Department of Statistics Uppsala University Supervisor: Patrik Andersson 2018 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Background 1 2.1 Automated Essay Scoring . .1 2.2 Existing Automatic Essay Scoring . .3 2.3 Evaluation of Automatic Essay Scoring . .3 2.4 Automatic Essay Scoring in Swedish . .4 2.5 A neural approach to Automatic Essay Scoring . .5 3 Method 6 3.1 Data . .7 3.2 Cross-validation . .9 3.3 Neural Networks . 10 3.3.1 Feedforward Network . 10 3.3.2 Loss function . 12 3.3.3 Neural network training . 13 3.3.4 Overfitting . 14 3.3.5 Recurrent Neural Network . 15 3.3.6 Pooling . 18 3.4 Working with textual data . 18 3.4.1 One-hot word vectors and word embeddings . 19 3.4.2 Pre-trained word embeddings . 21 3.5 Setup . 25 4 Results 27 5 Discussion 31 6 Conclusion 32 7 References 34 Abstract We propose a neural network-based system for automatically grading essays written in Swedish. Previous system either relies on laboriously crafted features extracted by human experts or are limited to essays writ- ten in English. By using different variations of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, our system automatically learns the relation between Swedish high-school essays and their assigned score. Using all of the in- termediate states from the LSTM network proved to be crucial in order to understand the essays. Furthermore, we evaluate different ways of repre- senting words as dense vectors which ultimately have a substantial effect on the overall performance. We compare our results to the ones achieved by the first and previously only automatic essay scoring system designed for the Swedish language. Although no state-of-the-art performance is reached, indication of the potential from a neural based grading system is found. 1 Introduction Grading student essays is an important yet potentially hard and slow process. Traditionally, the grading is carried out by a human rater which is more often than not also working as a professional teacher. Every hour spent on grading is time perhaps better spent on teaching and interacting with students. The rater is also vulnerable to subjective bias, generated by factors such as economic incentives, personal opinion and general state of mind. Swedish national exams have traditionally been graded by teachers employed at the same school as the students taking the exam. Furthermore, the exams are not anonymous, exposing the human rater to even more sources of bias. The grade from the national exam may not necessarily be used as the final course grade, but it could certainly have an substantial influence on it. Fortunately, recent decisions made by the Swedish government together with the Swedish National Agency for Education have initiated an effort towards the digitization of the national exams (Skolverket 2018). Along with it, there is also an intention of making the exams anonymous as well as switching to external raters. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) refers to the statistical and natural language processing (NLP) techniques used to grade student essays without the direct involvement of humans. Most existing AES system are constructed and used on English texts. To our knowledge, only one previous study has been published where an AES system is implemented on Swedish essays (Ostling¨ et al. 2013). This study uses a linear classifier with manual feature engineering. Since then, recent advancements within neural networks have allowed for the creation of new state-of-the-art AES systems, pushing the precision of the AES closer to perfection. All things considered, there is lot of potential gain from using AES for the grading of the Swedish national exams, especially at a time when the Swedish school system is being modernized. Therefore, the intention of this study is to make use of the latest findings within the AES research area and create as well as evaluate, a neural network based AES system on high school essays written in Swedish. Hopefully, this will reveal some of the advantages as well as difficulties to the potential implementation of an AES system into the Swedish school system. 2 Background 2.1 Automated Essay Scoring Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluate and score written prose (Shermis and Barrera 2002). AES systems are mainly developed to assist teachers in low-stakes classroom assessment and authorities as well as testing companies in high-stakes assessments, such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL iBT) and Graduate Record Ex- amination (GRE) tests. The main purpose of AES is to help overcome time, cost 1 and reliability as well as generalizability issues present in writing assessments (Dikli 2006). Most AES systems have implicitly or explicitly treated AES as a supervised text classification problem, utilizing a number of techniques within the field of natural language processing and machine learning. Usually, an AES system works as follows: A collection of student texts in their plain text form (also known as a text corpus) are inputted into the AES software. The first stage of the AES is to preprocess the texts, that is making the texts readable by the computer and useful for further analysis. Basic examples of this includes stripping the texts of whitespace and removing certain char- acters such as punctuation, both of which are examples of tokenization, which is the task of splitting text sequences into pieces, referred to as tokens. Other common methods employed in the preprocessing stage are normalization, stem- ming and lemmatization (Sch¨utze,Manning, and Raghavan 2008). The second stage typically involves feature extraction which is the process that maps the text sequences to a vector of measurable quantities, the most common exam- ple is the occurrences (frequency) of each unique word in the texts (Goldberg 2017). In most existing AES models, the feature extraction is a manual process performed by the researcher. It is considered as the most difficult part of the construction of an AES system and it is a real challenge for humans to take into account all the factors affecting the grade. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the AES system is constrained by the manually chosen features (Chen and He 2013). Lastly, a machine learning algorithm is implemented, using the pre- defined features as input. The type of models used in this last step is usually divided into three categories: regression, classification and preference ranking (Dong, Zhang, and Yang 2017). In the regression approach, often applied when the score range of the essays are wide, each score is seen as continuous values and regression models such as linear regression and Bayesian linear ridge re- gression are used (Attali and Burstein 2004; Phandi, Chai, and Ng 2015). In the classification approach, each score is instead seen as a separate class and common classification techniques such as support vector machine (SVM) and naive bayes (NB) are applied (Ostling¨ et al. 2013; Larkey 1998). Preference ranking has recently been proposed, where the scoring task is seen as a ranking problem (Yannakoudakis, Briscoe, and Medlock 2011). Formally, an AES system is trained to minimize the deviation between the system-generated scores and human scores, given a set of training data. This can be formulated as: N X ∗ min f(yi ; yi); s:t: yi = gθ(ti); i = 1; 2; :::; N; (1) θ i=1 ∗ where N is the number of texts used in the training set, yi is the human score and yi is the predicted AES system score of the i-th essay, respectively. The ∗ function f measures the difference between yi and yi, ti is the feature represen- tation of the i-th essay and g maps the feature ti to score yi (Dong, Zhang, and Yang 2017). 2 2.2 Existing Automatic Essay Scoring The first AES system is commonly credited to the Project Essay Grader (PEG) developed by Ellis Page in 1966 (Page 1967; Page 1968). In similarity to most AES systems, PEG first uses a training sample to form its weights and then inputs new and unseen data in the testing stage. Its primary method is to use the correlation between different intrinsic variables such as fluency, grammar and punctuation. Criticism of the PEG have pointed out that the system mainly captures the surface structure of the texts and neglects the deeper semantic aspect (Chung and O'Neil Jr 1997). It was also possible to trick the PEG system by writing longer essays (Dikli 2006). Another AES system which is also in use today, is the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA). This system is produced by the Pearson Knowledge Analysis Technologies. The IEA scoring system is implemented and used in the high- stake exam Pearson Test of English. Unlike other AES systems, the IEA is not used in combination with human raters but is instead the sole rater (Williamson, Xi, and Breyer 2012). In comparison to the PEG, the IEA uses a semantic text- analysis technique referred to as latent semantic analysis (Lemaire and Dessus 2001). Perhaps the most known AES system is the electronic essay rater (e-rater; Burstein and Marcu 2000; Burstein 2003; Attali and Burstein 2004) which is developed and maintained by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The scor- ing system of the e-rater uses regression in combination with predefined features representing different aspects of writing- and content quality (Williamson, Xi, and Breyer 2012). The number and type of extracted features have changed during the lifetime of the e-rater. However, ETS assures that these features are not only predictive of raters' score, but also have a meaningful correspondence to the features that raters are instructed to consider when they award scores (ETS 2018a).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Towards Interpretation As Natural Logic Abduction
    4Pin1-33 The 32nd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2018 Towards Interpretation as Natural Logic Abduction Naoya Inoue∗1 Pontus Stenetorp∗2 Sebastian Riedel∗2 Kentaro Inui∗1∗3 ∗1 Tohoku University ∗2 University College London ∗3 RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project This paper studies an abductive reasoning framework on natural language representations. We show how to incorporate Natural Logic (McCartney et al. 2009) into Interpretation as Abduction (Hobbs et al. 1993). The resulting framework avoids the difficulty of natural language-formal representation conversion, while handling im- portant linguistic expressions such as negations and quantifiers. For proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that missing, implicit premises of arguments can be recovered by the proposed framework by a manual example walkthrough. 1. Introduction is orthogonal to the conventional formal representation- based approaches. More specifically, we study Natural Abduction is inference to the best explanation. This pa- Logic [Maccartney 09, Bowman 13, Angeli 14] in the con- per explores abduction for natural language understanding. text of abductive reasoning. Natural Logic is a framework Given a textual observation, the task is to generate the originally developed for entailment prediction. The advan- best, textual explanation. For example, the task of find- tage is that (i) it works on natural language expression di- ing a missing assumption of an argument [Habernal 17] is a rectly, and (ii) it supports important linguistic expressions special form of abduction. Suppose the following argument ∗1 such as negations and quantifiers. is given : We show how Natural Logic-based inference can be inte- (1) Claim: Immigration is really a problem.
    [Show full text]
  • A Comparative Study of Pretrained Language Models for Automated Essay Scoring with Adversarial Inputs
    A Comparative Study of Pretrained Language Models for Automated Essay Scoring with Adversarial Inputs 1st Phakawat Wangkriangkri 2nd Chanissara Viboonlarp 3rd Attapol T. Rutherford Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering Department of Linguistics Chulalongkorn University Chulalongkorn University Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand Bangkok, Thailand Bangkok, Thailand [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 4th Ekapol Chuangsuwanich Department of Computer Engineering Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand [email protected] Abstract—Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a task that for scoring essays. We experimented three popular transfer- deals with grading written essays automatically without human learning text encoders: Global Vectors for Word Repre- intervention. This study compares the performance of three sentation (GloVe) [6], Embeddings from Language Models AES models which utilize different text embedding methods, namely Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe), Em- (ELMo) [7], and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from beddings from Language Models (ELMo), and Bidirectional Transformers (BERT) [8]. An ideal AES system should both Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We used correlate with manually-graded essay scores and be resistant two evaluation metrics: Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and to adversarial hacks; thus, we evaluated the models against a novel “robustness”, which quantifies the models’ ability to both criteria. detect adversarial essays created by modifying normal essays to cause them to be less coherent. We found that: (1) the BERT- Our contributions can be summarized as follows: based model achieved the greatest robustness, followed by the • We developed three AES-specific models utilizing dif- GloVe-based and ELMo-based models, respectively, and (2) fine- ferent transfer-learning text encoders, and compared tuning the embeddings improves QWK but lowers robustness.
    [Show full text]
  • The Effects of Automated Essay Scoring As a High School Classroom Intervention
    UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations 1-1-2008 The effects of automated essay scoring as a high school classroom intervention Kathie L Frost University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/rtds Repository Citation Frost, Kathie L, "The effects of automated essay scoring as a high school classroom intervention" (2008). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 2839. http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/37p4-kdh7 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE EFFECTS OF AUTOMATED ESSAY SCORING AS A HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM INTERVENTION by Kathie L. Frost Bachelor of Science University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona Master of Business Administration University of Nevada, Las Vegas A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Curriculum and Instruction Department of Curriculum and Instruction College of Education Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas December 2008 UMI Number: 3352171 Copyright 2009 by Frost, Kathie L.
    [Show full text]
  • A Hierarchical Classification Approach to Automated Essay Scoring
    Assessing Writing 23 (2015) 35–59 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Assessing Writing A hierarchical classification approach to automated essay scoring a,∗ b a Danielle S. McNamara , Scott A. Crossley , Rod D. Roscoe , a a Laura K. Allen , Jianmin Dai a Arizona State University, United States b Georgia State University, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: This study evaluates the use of a hierarchical classification approach Received 22 September 2013 to automated assessment of essays. Automated essay scoring (AES) Received in revised form 2 September 2014 generally relies on machine learning techniques that compute essay Accepted 4 September 2014 scores using a set of text variables. Unlike previous studies that rely on regression models, this study computes essay scores using Keywords: a hierarchical approach, analogous to an incremental algorithm Automated essay scoring for hierarchical classification. The corpus in this study consists of AES 1243 argumentative (persuasive) essays written on 14 different Writing assessment prompts, across 3 different grade levels (9th grade, 11th grade, Hierarchical classification college freshman), and four different time limits for writing or temporal conditions (untimed essays and essays written in 10, 15, and 25 minute increments). The features included in the analysis are computed using the automated tools, Coh-Metrix, the Writing Assessment Tool (WAT), and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Overall, the models developed to score all the essays in the data set report 55% exact accuracy and 92% adjacent accuracy between the predicted essay scores and the human scores.
    [Show full text]
  • Automated Essay Scoring: a Siamese Bidirectional LSTM Neural Network Architecture
    S S symmetry Article Automated Essay Scoring: A Siamese Bidirectional LSTM Neural Network Architecture Guoxi Liang 1,2 , Byung-Won On 3,*,†, Dongwon Jeong 3 and Hyun-Chul Kim 4 and Gyu Sang Choi 5,* 1 Department of Global Entrepreneurship, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Korea; [email protected] 2 Department of Information Technology, Wenzhou Vocational & Technical College, Wenzhou 325035, China 3 Department of Software Convergence Engineering, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Korea; [email protected] 4 Department of Technological Business Startup, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Korea; [email protected] 5 Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan 38541, Korea * Correspondence: [email protected] (B.-W.O.); [email protected] (G.S.C.); Tel.: +82-63-469-8913 (B.-W.O.) † Current address: 151-109 Digital Information Building, Department of Software Convergence Engineering, Kunsan National University 558 Daehak-ro, Gunsan, Jeollabuk-do 573-701, Korea. Received: 14 November 2018; Accepted: 27 November 2018; Published: 01 December 2018 Abstract: Essay scoring is a critical task in education. Implementing automated essay scoring (AES) helps reduce manual workload and speed up learning feedback. Recently, neural network models have been applied to the task of AES and demonstrates tremendous potential. However, the existing work only considered the essay itself without considering the rating criteria behind the essay. One of the reasons is that the various kinds of rating criteria are very hard to represent. In this paper, we represent rating criteria by some sample essays that were provided by domain experts and defined a new input pair consisting of an essay and a sample essay.
    [Show full text]
  • Automated Evaluation of Writing – 50 Years and Counting
    Automated Evaluation of Writing – 50 Years and Counting Beata Beigman Klebanov and Nitin Madnani Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA {bbeigmanklebanov,nmadnani}@ets.org Abstract 2 Report Card: Where are We Now? 2.1 Accomplishments Page’s minimal desiderata have certainly been In this theme paper, we reflect on the progress of achieved – AWE systems today can score in agree- Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE), using Ellis ment with the average human rater, at least in Page’s seminal 1966 paper to frame the presenta- some contexts.1 For example, Pearson’s Intelli- tion. We discuss some of the current frontiers in gent Essay Assessor™ (IEA) scores essays writ- the field, and offer some thoughts on the emergent ten for the Pearson Test of English (PTE) as well uses of this technology. as for other contexts: “IEA was developed more 1 A Minimal Case for AWE than a decade ago and has been used to evaluate millions of essays, from scoring student writing at In a seminal paper on the imminence of automated elementary, secondary and university level, to as- grading of essays, Page (1966) showed that a high sessing military leadership skills.”2 Besides sole correlation between holistic machine and human automated scoring as for PTE, there are additional scores is possible. He demonstrated automated contexts where the automated score is used in ad- scoring of 276 essays written by high school stu- dition to a human score, such as for essays written dents by a system with 32 features, resulting in a for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE®)3 multiple R = 0:65 between machine and average or for the Test of English as a Foreign Language human score, after adjustment.
    [Show full text]
  • Pearson's Automated Scoring of Writing, Speaking, and Mathematics
    Pearson’s Automated Scoring of Writing, Speaking, and Mathematics White Paper Lynn Streeter, Ph.D. Jared Bernstein, Ph.D. Peter Foltz, Ph.D. Donald DeLand May 2011 AUTOMATED SCORING 1 About Pearson Pearson, the global leader in education and education technology, provides innovative print and digital education materials for preK through college, student information systems and learning management systems, teacher licensure testing, teacher professional development, career certification programs, and testing and assessment products that set the standard for the industry. Pearson’s other primary businesses include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group. For more information about the Assessment & Information group of Pearson, visit http://www.pearsonassessments.com/. About Pearson’s White Papers Pearson’s white paper series shares the perspectives of our assessment experts on selected topics of interest to educators, researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders involved in assessment and instruction. Pearson’s publications in .pdf format may be obtained at: http://www.pearsonassessments.com/research. AUTOMATED SCORING 2 Executive Summary The new assessment systems designed to measure the Common Core standards will include far more performance-based items and tasks than most of today’s assessments. In order to provide feedback quickly and make scoring of the responses affordable, the new assessments will rely heavily on artificial intelligence scoring, hereafter referred to as automated scoring. Familiarity with the current range of applications and the operational accuracy of automatic scoring technology can help provide an understanding of which item types can be scored automatically in the near term. This document describes several examples of current item types that Pearson has designed and fielded successfully with automatic scoring.
    [Show full text]
  • Automated Essay Scoring: a Survey of the State of the Art
    Automated Essay Scoring: A Survey of the State of the Art Zixuan Ke and Vincent Ng Human Language Technology Research Institute, University of Texas at Dallas, USA fzixuan, [email protected] Abstract Dimension Description Grammaticality Grammar Despite being investigated for over 50 years, the Usage Use of prepositions, word usage task of automated essay scoring continues to draw Mechanics Spelling, punctuation, capitalization a lot of attention in the natural language process- Style Word choice, sentence structure variety ing community in part because of its commercial Relevance Relevance of the content to the prompt and educational values as well as the associated re- Organization How well the essay is structured search challenges. This paper presents an overview Development Development of ideas with examples of the major milestones made in automated essay Cohesion Appropriate use of transition phrases scoring research since its inception. Coherence Appropriate transitions between ideas Thesis Clarity Clarity of the thesis 1 Introduction Persuasiveness Convincingness of the major argument Automated essay scoring (AES), the task of employing com- Table 1: Different dimensions of essay quality. puter technology to score written text, is one of the most im- portant educational applications of natural language process- ing (NLP). This area of research began with Page’s [1966] help an author identify which aspects of her essay need im- pioneering work on the Project Essay Grader system and has provements. remained active since then. The vast majority of work on From a research perspective, one of the most interesting AES has focused on holistic scoring, which summarizes the aspects of the AES task is that it encompasses a set of NLP quality of an essay with a single score.
    [Show full text]
  • Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays
    Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP), Beijing, China, July 2015, pp. 543--552. Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays Isaac Persing and Vincent Ng Human Language Technology Research Institute University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75083-0688 {persingq,vince}@hlt.utdallas.edu Abstract (Persing and Ng, 2013). Essay grading software that provides feedback along multiple dimensions While recent years have seen a surge of in- of essay quality such as E-rater/Criterion (Attali terest in automated essay grading, includ- and Burstein, 2006) has also begun to emerge. ing work on grading essays with respect Our goal in this paper is to develop a com- to particular dimensions such as prompt putational model for scoring the essay dimension adherence, coherence, and technical qual- of argument strength, which is arguably the most ity, there has been relatively little work important aspect of argumentative essays. Argu- on grading the essay dimension of argu- ment strength refers to the strength of the argu- ment strength, which is arguably the most ment an essay makes for its thesis. An essay with important aspect of argumentative essays. a high argument strength score presents a strong We introduce a new corpus of argumen- argument for its thesis and would convince most tative student essays annotated with argu- readers. While there has been work on design- ment strength scores and propose a su- ing argument schemes (e.g., Burstein et al. (2003), pervised, feature-rich approach to auto- Song et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Get IT Scored Using Autosas!
    The Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI-19) Get IT Scored Using AutoSAS — An Automated System for Scoring Short Answers Yaman Kumar,1 Swati Aggarwal,2 Debanjan Mahata,3 Rajiv Ratn Shah,4 Ponnurangam Kumaraguru,4 Roger Zimmermann5 1Adobe, India, 2NSIT-Delhi, India, 3Bloomberg, USA 4IIIT-Delhi, India, 5National University of Singapore, Singapore [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract have been taught to write their essays and short answers (Dale and Krueger 2002). In the era of MOOCs, online exams are taken by millions of candidates, where scoring short answers is an integral part. It becomes intractable to evaluate them by human graders. Motivation Thus, a generic automated system capable of grading these Automated Essay Scoring (AES) and Short Answer Scoring responses should be designed and deployed. In this paper, we (SAS) systems such as the one presented in this work (Au- present a fast, scalable, and accurate approach towards auto- toSAS), provides economic advantages to testing companies mated Short Answer Scoring (SAS). We propose and explain and state-wide corporations. These systems reduce the eco- the design and development of a system for SAS, namely nomic and time burden of getting each response checked by AutoSAS. Given a question along with its graded samples, AutoSAS can learn to grade that prompt successfully. This human graders close to zero, bringing down the cost and ef- paper further lays down the features such as lexical diver- fort significantly. sity, Word2Vec, prompt, and content overlap that plays a piv- It has been noted that about 30% of a teacher’s time is otal role in building our proposed model.
    [Show full text]
  • Enhancing Automated Essay Scoring Performance Via Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Language Models with Combination of Regression and Ranking
    Enhancing Automated Essay Scoring Performance via Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models with Combination of Regression and Ranking Ruosong Yang†‡, Jiannong Cao†, Zhiyuan Wen†, Youzheng Wu‡, Xiaodong He‡ †Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University ‡JD AI Research †{csryang, csjcao, cszwen}@comp.polyu.edu.hk ‡{wuyouzheng1, xiaodong.he}@jd.com Abstract variation), different raters scoring the same essay may assign different scores (inter-rater variation) Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a critical (Smolentzov, 2013). To alleviate teachers’ bur- text regression task that automatically assigns den and avoid intra-rater variation, as well as inter- scores to essays based on their writing qual- ity. Recently, the performance of sentence rater variation, AES is necessary and essential. An prediction tasks has been largely improved by early AES system, e-rater (Chodorow and Burstein, using Pre-trained Language Models via fus- 2004), has been used to score TOEFL writings. ing representations from different layers, con- Recently, large pre-trained language models, structing an auxiliary sentence, using multi- such as GPT (Radford et al., 2018), BERT (Devlin task learning, etc. However, to solve the AES et al., 2019), XLNet (Yang et al., 2019), etc. have task, previous works utilize shallow neural net- shown the extraordinary ability of representation works to learn essay representations and con- strain calculated scores with regression loss or and generalization. These models have gained bet- ranking loss, respectively. Since shallow neu- ter performance in lots of downstream tasks such as ral networks trained on limited samples show text classification and regression. There are many poor performance to capture deep semantic of new approaches to fine-tune pre-trained language texts.
    [Show full text]
  • Neural Automated Essay Scoring Incorporating Handcrafted Features
    Neural Automated Essay Scoring Incorporating Handcrafted Features Masaki Uto Yikuan Xie Maomi Ueno The University of The University of The University of Electro-Communications Electro-Communications Electro-Communications [email protected] yikuan.xie@ [email protected] ai.lab.uec.ac.jp Abstract Automated essay scoring (AES) is the task of automatically assigning scores to essays as an al- ternative to grading by human raters. Conventional AES typically relies on handcrafted features, whereas recent studies have proposed AES models based on deep neural networks (DNNs) to obviate the need for feature engineering. Furthermore, hybrid methods that integrate handcrafted features in a DNN-AES model have been recently developed and have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. One of the most popular hybrid methods is formulated as a DNN-AES model with an additional recurrent neural network (RNN) that processes a sequence of handcrafted sentence- level features. However, this method has the following problems: 1) It cannot incorporate effec- tive essay-level features developed in previous AES research. 2) It greatly increases the numbers of model parameters and tuning parameters, increasing the difficulty of model training. 3) It has an additional RNN to process sentence-level features, enabling extension to various DNN-AES models complex. To resolve these problems, we propose a new hybrid method that integrates handcrafted essay-level features into a DNN-AES model. Specifically, our method concatenates handcrafted essay-level features to a distributed essay representation vector, which is obtained from an intermediate layer of a DNN-AES model. Our method is a simple DNN-AES extension, but significantly improves scoring accuracy.
    [Show full text]