@inproceedings{sayed-etal-2025-feature,
title = "Feature Engineering is not Dead: A Step Towards State of the Art for {A}rabic Automated Essay Scoring",
author = "Sayed, Marwan and
Eltanbouly, Sohaila and
Bashendy, May and
Elsayed, Tamer",
editor = "Darwish, Kareem and
Ali, Ahmed and
Abu Farha, Ibrahim and
Touileb, Samia and
Zitouni, Imed and
Abdelali, Ahmed and
Al-Ghamdi, Sharefah and
Alkhereyf, Sakhar and
Zaghouani, Wajdi and
Khalifa, Salam and
AlKhamissi, Badr and
Almatham, Rawan and
Hamed, Injy and
Alyafeai, Zaid and
Alowisheq, Areeb and
Inoue, Go and
Mrini, Khalil and
Alshammari, Waad",
booktitle = "Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.19/",
pages = "231--245",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-352-4",
abstract = "Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has shown significant advancements in educational assessment. However, under-resourced languages like Arabic have received limited attention. To bridge this gap and enable robust Arabic AES, this paper introduces the $\textit{first publicly-available}$ comprehensive set of engineered features tailored for Arabic AES, covering surface-level, readability, lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 620 Arabic essays, each annotated with both holistic and trait-specific scores. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed feature set is effective across different models and competitive with recent NLP advances including LLMs, establishing the state-of-the-art performance and providing strong baselines for future Arabic AES research. Moroever, the resulting feature set offers a reusable and foundational resource, contributing towards the development of more effective Arabic AES systems."
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<abstract>Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has shown significant advancements in educational assessment. However, under-resourced languages like Arabic have received limited attention. To bridge this gap and enable robust Arabic AES, this paper introduces the first publicly-available comprehensive set of engineered features tailored for Arabic AES, covering surface-level, readability, lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 620 Arabic essays, each annotated with both holistic and trait-specific scores. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed feature set is effective across different models and competitive with recent NLP advances including LLMs, establishing the state-of-the-art performance and providing strong baselines for future Arabic AES research. Moroever, the resulting feature set offers a reusable and foundational resource, contributing towards the development of more effective Arabic AES systems.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Feature Engineering is not Dead: A Step Towards State of the Art for Arabic Automated Essay Scoring
%A Sayed, Marwan
%A Eltanbouly, Sohaila
%A Bashendy, May
%A Elsayed, Tamer
%Y Darwish, Kareem
%Y Ali, Ahmed
%Y Abu Farha, Ibrahim
%Y Touileb, Samia
%Y Zitouni, Imed
%Y Abdelali, Ahmed
%Y Al-Ghamdi, Sharefah
%Y Alkhereyf, Sakhar
%Y Zaghouani, Wajdi
%Y Khalifa, Salam
%Y AlKhamissi, Badr
%Y Almatham, Rawan
%Y Hamed, Injy
%Y Alyafeai, Zaid
%Y Alowisheq, Areeb
%Y Inoue, Go
%Y Mrini, Khalil
%Y Alshammari, Waad
%S Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-352-4
%F sayed-etal-2025-feature
%X Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has shown significant advancements in educational assessment. However, under-resourced languages like Arabic have received limited attention. To bridge this gap and enable robust Arabic AES, this paper introduces the first publicly-available comprehensive set of engineered features tailored for Arabic AES, covering surface-level, readability, lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 620 Arabic essays, each annotated with both holistic and trait-specific scores. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed feature set is effective across different models and competitive with recent NLP advances including LLMs, establishing the state-of-the-art performance and providing strong baselines for future Arabic AES research. Moroever, the resulting feature set offers a reusable and foundational resource, contributing towards the development of more effective Arabic AES systems.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.19/
%P 231-245
Markdown (Informal)
[Feature Engineering is not Dead: A Step Towards State of the Art for Arabic Automated Essay Scoring](https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.19/) (Sayed et al., ArabicNLP 2025)
ACL