Score It All Together: A Multi-Task Learning Study on Automatic Scoring of Argumentative Essays

Yuning Ding, Marie Bexte, Andrea Horbach


Abstract
When scoring argumentative essays in an educational context, not only the presence or absence of certain argumentative elements but also their quality is important. On the recently published student essay dataset PERSUADE, we first show that the automatic scoring of argument quality benefits from additional information about context, writing prompt and argument type. We then explore the different combinations of three tasks: automated span detection, type and quality prediction. Results show that a multi-task learning approach combining the three tasks outperforms sequential approaches that first learn to segment and then predict the quality/type of a segment.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.825
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:
13052–13063
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.825
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.825
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuning Ding, Marie Bexte, and Andrea Horbach. 2023. Score It All Together: A Multi-Task Learning Study on Automatic Scoring of Argumentative Essays. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 13052–13063, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Score It All Together: A Multi-Task Learning Study on Automatic Scoring of Argumentative Essays (Ding et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.825.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.825.mp4