A Semantic Feature-Wise Transformation Relation Network for Automatic Short Answer Grading

Zhaohui Li, Yajur Tomar, Rebecca J. Passonneau


Abstract
Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) is the task of assessing students’ short natural language responses to objective questions. It is a crucial component of new education platforms, and could support more wide-spread use of constructed response questions to replace cognitively less challenging multiple choice questions. We propose a Semantic Feature-wise transformation Relation Network (SFRN) that exploits the multiple components of ASAG datasets more effectively. SFRN captures relational knowledge among the questions (Q), reference answers or rubrics (R), and labeled student answers (A). A relation network learns vector representations for the elements of QRA triples, then combines the learned representations using learned semantic feature-wise transformations. We apply translation-based data augmentation to address the two problems of limited training data, and high data skew for multi-class ASAG tasks. Our model has up to 11% performance improvement over state-of-the-art results on the benchmark SemEval-2013 datasets, and surpasses custom approaches designed for a Kaggle challenge, demonstrating its generality.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.487
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6030–6040
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.487
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.487
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaohui Li, Yajur Tomar, and Rebecca J. Passonneau. 2021. A Semantic Feature-Wise Transformation Relation Network for Automatic Short Answer Grading. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6030–6040, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Semantic Feature-Wise Transformation Relation Network for Automatic Short Answer Grading (Li et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.487.pdf
Video:
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