Similarity-Based Content Scoring - A more Classroom-Suitable Alternative to Instance-Based Scoring?

Marie Bexte, Andrea Horbach, Torsten Zesch


Abstract
Automatically scoring student answers is an important task that is usually solved using instance-based supervised learning. Recently, similarity-based scoring has been proposed as an alternative approach yielding similar perfor- mance. It has hypothetical advantages such as a lower need for annotated training data and better zero-shot performance, both of which are properties that would be highly beneficial when applying content scoring in a realistic classroom setting. In this paper we take a closer look at these alleged advantages by comparing different instance-based and similarity-based methods on multiple data sets in a number of learning curve experiments. We find that both the demand on data and cross-prompt performance is similar, thus not confirming the former two suggested advantages. The by default more straightforward possibility to give feedback based on a similarity-based approach may thus tip the scales in favor of it, although future work is needed to explore this advantage in practice.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.119
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1892–1903
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.119
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.119
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marie Bexte, Andrea Horbach, and Torsten Zesch. 2023. Similarity-Based Content Scoring - A more Classroom-Suitable Alternative to Instance-Based Scoring?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1892–1903, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Similarity-Based Content Scoring - A more Classroom-Suitable Alternative to Instance-Based Scoring? (Bexte et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.119.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.119.mp4