Many Hands Make Light Work: Using Essay Traits to Automatically Score Essays
Rahul Kumar, Sandeep Mathias, Sriparna Saha, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Abstract
Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been little work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays 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. To find out which traits work best for different types of essays, we conduct ablation tests for each of the essay traits. We also report the runtime and number of training parameters for each system. We find that MTL-based BiLSTM system gives the best results for scoring the essay holistically, as well as performing well on scoring the essay traits. The MTL systems also give a speed-up of between 2.30 to 3.70 times the speed of the STL system, when it comes to scoring the essay and all the traits.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.106
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1485–1495
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.106
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.106
- Cite (ACL):
- Rahul Kumar, Sandeep Mathias, Sriparna Saha, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2022. Many Hands Make Light Work: Using Essay Traits to Automatically Score Essays. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1485–1495, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Many Hands Make Light Work: Using Essay Traits to Automatically Score Essays (Kumar et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.naacl-main.106.pdf
- Code
- ASAP-AEG/MTL-Essay-Traits-Scoring
- Data
- ASAP