Can Neural Networks Automatically Score Essay Traits?

Sandeep Mathias, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Essay traits are attributes of an essay that can help explain how well written (or badly written) the essay is. Examples of traits include Content, Organization, Language, Sentence Fluency, Word Choice, etc. A lot of research in the last decade has dealt with automatic holistic essay scoring - where a machine rates an essay and gives a score for the essay. However, writers need feedback, especially if they want to improve their writing - which is why trait-scoring is important. In this paper, we show how a deep-learning based system can outperform feature-based machine learning systems, as well as a string kernel system in scoring essay traits.
Anthology ID:
2020.bea-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Seattle, WA, USA → Online
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Ekaterina Kochmar, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildikó Pilán, Helen Yannakoudakis, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
85–91
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.bea-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.bea-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sandeep Mathias and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2020. Can Neural Networks Automatically Score Essay Traits?. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 85–91, Seattle, WA, USA → Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Neural Networks Automatically Score Essay Traits? (Mathias & Bhattacharyya, BEA 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.bea-1.8.pdf