Pre-Training BERT on Domain Resources for Short Answer Grading

Chul Sung, Tejas Dhamecha, Swarnadeep Saha, Tengfei Ma, Vinay Reddy, Rishi Arora


Abstract
Pre-trained BERT contextualized representations have achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple downstream NLP tasks by fine-tuning with task-specific data. While there has been a lot of focus on task-specific fine-tuning, there has been limited work on improving the pre-trained representations. In this paper, we explore ways of improving the pre-trained contextual representations for the task of automatic short answer grading, a critical component of intelligent tutoring systems. We show that the pre-trained BERT model can be improved by augmenting data from the domain-specific resources like textbooks. We also present a new approach to use labeled short answering grading data for further enhancement of the language model. Empirical evaluation on multi-domain datasets shows that task-specific fine-tuning on the enhanced pre-trained language model achieves superior performance for short answer grading.
Anthology ID:
D19-1628
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6071–6075
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1628
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1628
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chul Sung, Tejas Dhamecha, Swarnadeep Saha, Tengfei Ma, Vinay Reddy, and Rishi Arora. 2019. Pre-Training BERT on Domain Resources for Short Answer Grading. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6071–6075, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pre-Training BERT on Domain Resources for Short Answer Grading (Sung et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1628.pdf