Prompt- and Trait Relation-aware Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring

Heejin Do, Yunsu Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee


Abstract
Automated essay scoring (AES) aims to score essays written for a given prompt, which defines the writing topic. Most existing AES systems assume to grade essays of the same prompt as used in training and assign only a holistic score. However, such settings conflict with real-education situations; pre-graded essays for a particular prompt are lacking, and detailed trait scores of sub-rubrics are required. Thus, predicting various trait scores of unseen-prompt essays (called cross-prompt essay trait scoring) is a remaining challenge of AES. In this paper, we propose a robust model: prompt- and trait relation-aware cross-prompt essay trait scorer. We encode prompt-aware essay representation by essay-prompt attention and utilizing the topic-coherence feature extracted by the topic-modeling mechanism without access to labeled data; therefore, our model considers the prompt adherence of an essay, even in a cross-prompt setting. To facilitate multi-trait scoring, we design trait-similarity loss that encapsulates the correlations of traits. Experiments prove the efficacy of our model, showing state-of-the-art results for all prompts and traits. Significant improvements in low-resource-prompt and inferior traits further indicate our model’s strength.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.98
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:
1538–1551
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.98
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.98
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heejin Do, Yunsu Kim, and Gary Geunbae Lee. 2023. Prompt- and Trait Relation-aware Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1538–1551, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompt- and Trait Relation-aware Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring (Do et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.98.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.98.mp4