@inproceedings{nadeem-etal-2019-automated,
    title = "Automated Essay Scoring with Discourse-Aware Neural Models",
    author = "Nadeem, Farah  and
      Nguyen, Huy  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Ostendorf, Mari",
    editor = "Yannakoudakis, Helen  and
      Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Leacock, Claudia  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Pil{\'a}n, Ildik{\'o}  and
      Zesch, Torsten",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W19-4450/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-4450",
    pages = "484--493",
    abstract = "Automated essay scoring systems typically rely on hand-crafted features to predict essay quality, but such systems are limited by the cost of feature engineering. Neural networks offer an alternative to feature engineering, but they typically require more annotated data. This paper explores network structures, contextualized embeddings and pre-training strategies aimed at capturing discourse characteristics of essays. Experiments on three essay scoring tasks show benefits from all three strategies in different combinations, with simpler architectures being more effective when less training data is available."
}