Hui Lin


2022

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On the Use of Bert for Automated Essay Scoring: Joint Learning of Multi-Scale Essay Representation
Yongjie Wang | Chuang Wang | Ruobing Li | Hui Lin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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 essay representation and obtains almost the state-of-the-art result among all deep learning models in the ASAP task. Our multi-scale essay representation also generalizes well to CommonLit Readability Prize data set, which suggests that the novel text representation proposed in this paper may be a new and effective choice for long-text tasks.

2020

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Gated Convolutional Bidirectional Attention-based Model for Off-topic Spoken Response Detection
Yefei Zha | Ruobing Li | Hui Lin
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Off-topic spoken response detection, the task aiming at predicting whether a response is off-topic for the corresponding prompt, is important for an automated speaking assessment system. In many real-world educational applications, off-topic spoken response detectors are required to achieve high recall for off-topic responses not only on seen prompts but also on prompts that are unseen during training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for off-topic spoken response detection with high off-topic recall on both seen and unseen prompts. We introduce a new model, Gated Convolutional Bidirectional Attention-based Model (GCBiA), which applies bi-attention mechanism and convolutions to extract topic words of prompts and key-phrases of responses, and introduces gated unit and residual connections between major layers to better represent the relevance of responses and prompts. Moreover, a new negative sampling method is proposed to augment training data. Experiment results demonstrate that our novel approach can achieve significant improvements in detecting off-topic responses with extremely high on-topic recall, for both seen and unseen prompts.

2019

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Give Me More Feedback II: Annotating Thesis Strength and Related Attributes in Student Essays
Zixuan Ke | Hrishikesh Inamdar | Hui Lin | Vincent Ng
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

While the vast majority of existing work on automated essay scoring has focused on holistic scoring, researchers have recently begun work on scoring specific dimensions of essay quality. Nevertheless, progress on dimension-specific essay scoring is limited in part by the lack of annotated corpora. To facilitate advances in this area, we design a scoring rubric for scoring a core, yet unexplored dimension of persuasive essay quality, thesis strength, and annotate a corpus of essays with thesis strength scores. We additionally identify the attributes that could impact thesis strength and annotate the essays with the values of these attributes, which, when predicted by computational models, could provide further feedback to students on why her essay receives a particular thesis strength score.

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The LAIX Systems in the BEA-2019 GEC Shared Task
Ruobing Li | Chuan Wang | Yefei Zha | Yonghong Yu | Shiman Guo | Qiang Wang | Yang Liu | Hui Lin
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

In this paper, we describe two systems we developed for the three tracks we have participated in the BEA-2019 GEC Shared Task. We investigate competitive classification models with bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN) and neural machine translation (NMT) models. For different tracks, we use ensemble systems to selectively combine the NMT models, the classification models, and some rules, and demonstrate that an ensemble solution can effectively improve GEC performance over single systems. Our GEC systems ranked the first in the Unrestricted Track, and the third in both the Restricted Track and the Low Resource Track.

2014

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A Repository of State of the Art and Competitive Baseline Summaries for Generic News Summarization
Kai Hong | John Conroy | Benoit Favre | Alex Kulesza | Hui Lin | Ani Nenkova
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In the period since 2004, many novel sophisticated approaches for generic multi-document summarization have been developed. Intuitive simple approaches have also been shown to perform unexpectedly well for the task. Yet it is practically impossible to compare the existing approaches directly, because systems have been evaluated on different datasets, with different evaluation measures, against different sets of comparison systems. Here we present a corpus of summaries produced by several state-of-the-art extractive summarization systems or by popular baseline systems. The inputs come from the 2004 DUC evaluation, the latest year in which generic summarization was addressed in a shared task. We use the same settings for ROUGE automatic evaluation to compare the systems directly and analyze the statistical significance of the differences in performance. We show that in terms of average scores the state-of-the-art systems appear similar but that in fact they produce very different summaries. Our corpus will facilitate future research on generic summarization and motivates the need for development of more sensitive evaluation measures and for approaches to system combination in summarization.

2011

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A Class of Submodular Functions for Document Summarization
Hui Lin | Jeff Bilmes
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Word Alignment via Submodular Maximization over Matroids
Hui Lin | Jeff Bilmes
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2010

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Multi-document Summarization via Budgeted Maximization of Submodular Functions
Hui Lin | Jeff Bilmes
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics