Current cross-prompt automatic essay scoring (AES) systems are primarily concerned with obtaining shared knowledge specific to the target prompt by using the source and target prompt essays. However, it may not be feasible in practical situations because the target prompt essays may not be available as training data. When constructing a model solely from source prompt essays, its capacity to generalize to the target prompt may be hindered by significant discrepancies among different prompt essays. In this study, a novel learning framework for cross-prompt AES is proposed in order to capture more general knowledge across prompts and improve the model’s capacity to distinguish between writing levels. To acquire generic knowledge across different prompts, a primary model is trained via meta learning with all source prompt essays. To improve the model’s ability to differentiate writing levels, we present a level-aware learning strategy consisting of a general scorer and three level scorers for low-, middle-, and high-level essays. Then, we introduce a contrastive learning strategy to bring the essay representation of the general scorer closer to its corresponding level representation and far away from the other two levels, thereby improving the system’s ability to differentiate writing levels as well as boosting scoring performance. Experimental results on public datasets illustrate the efficacy of our method.

Due to the difficulty of creating high-quality labelled training data for different languages, the low-resource problem is crucial yet challenging for automated essay scoring (AES). However, little attention has been paid to addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot cross-lingual scoring method from the perspectives of pretrained multilingual representation and writing quality alignment to score essays in unseen languages. Specifically, we adopt multilingual pretrained language models as the encoder backbone to deeply and comprehensively represent multilingual essays. Motivated by the fact that the scoring knowledge for evaluating writing quality is comparable across different languages, we introduce an innovative strategy for aligning essays in a language-independent manner. The proposed strategy aims to capture shared knowledge from diverse languages, thereby enhancing the representation of essays written in unseen languages with respect to their quality. We include essay datasets in six languages (Czech, German, English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) to establish extensive experiments, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-lingual scoring performance.

Current cross-prompt automated essay scoring (AES) is a challenging task due to the large discrepancies between different prompts, such as different genres and expressions. The main goal of current cross-prompt AES systems is to learn enough shared features between the source and target prompts to grade well on the target prompt. However, because the features are captured based on the original prompt representation, they may be limited by being extracted directly between essays. In fact, when the representations of two prompts are more similar, we can gain more shared features between them. Based on this motivation, in this paper, we propose a learning strategy called “prompt-mapping” to learn about more consistent representations of source and target prompts. In this way, we can obtain more shared features between the two prompts and use them to better represent the essays for the target prompt. Experimental results on the ASAP++ dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We also design experiments in different settings to show that our method can be applied in different scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/gdufsnlp/PMAES.

Data augmentation aims at expanding training data with clean text using noising schemes to improve the performance of grammatical error correction (GEC). In practice, there are a great number of real error patterns in the manually annotated training data. We argue that these real error patterns can be introduced into clean text to effectively generate more real and high quality synthetic data, which is not fully explored by previous studies. Moreover, we also find that linguistic knowledge can be incorporated into data augmentation for generating more representative and more diverse synthetic data. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method that fully considers the real error patterns and the linguistic knowledge for the GEC task. We conduct extensive experiments on public data sets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong baselines with far less external unlabeled clean text data, highlighting its extraordinary effectiveness in the GEC task that lacks large-scale labeled training data.

A dataset of COVID-19-related scientific literature is compiled, combining the articles from several online libraries and selecting those with open access and full text available. Then, hierarchical nonnegative matrix factorization is used to organize literature related to the novel coronavirus into a tree structure that allows researchers to search for relevant literature based on detected topics. We discover eight major latent topics and 52 granular subtopics in the body of literature, related to vaccines, genetic structure and modeling of the disease and patient studies, as well as related diseases and virology. In order that our tool may help current researchers, an interactive website is created that organizes available literature using this hierarchical structure.

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to predict sentiment of language text with the help of other modalities, such as vision and acoustic features. Previous studies focused on learning the joint representation of multiple modalities, ignoring some useful knowledge contained in language modal. In this paper, we try to incorporate sentimental words knowledge into the fusion network to guide the learning of joint representation of multimodal features. Our method consists of two components: shallow fusion part and aggregation part. For the shallow fusion part, we use crossmodal coattention mechanism to obtain bidirectional context information of each two modals to get the fused shallow representations. For the aggregation part, we design a multitask of sentimental words classification to help and guide the deep fusion of the three modalities and obtain the final sentimental words aware fusion representation. We carry out several experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI and YouTube datasets. The experimental results show that introducing sentimental words prediction as a multitask can really improve the fusion representation of multiple modalities.

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to learn a joint representation of multiple features. As demonstrated by previous studies, it is shown that the language modality may contain more semantic information than that of other modalities. Based on this observation, we propose a Multi-perspective Fusion Network(MPFN) focusing on Sense Attentive Language for multimodal sentiment analysis. Different from previous studies, we use the language modality as the main part of the final joint representation, and propose a multi-stage and uni-stage fusion strategy to get the fusion representation of the multiple modalities to assist the final language-dominated multimodal representation. In our model, a Sense-Level Attention Network is proposed to dynamically learn the word representation which is guided by the fusion of the multiple modalities. As in turn, the learned language representation can also help the multi-stage and uni-stage fusion of the different modalities. In this way, the model can jointly learn a well integrated final representation focusing on the language and the interactions between the multiple modalities both on multi-stage and uni-stage. Several experiments are carried on the CMU-MOSI, the CMU-MOSEI and the YouTube public datasets. The experiments show that our model performs better or competitive results compared with the baseline models.