Evaluating Sampling Strategies for Similarity-Based Short Answer Scoring: a Case Study in Thailand

Pachara Boonsarngsuk, Pacharapon Arpanantikul, Supakorn Hiranwipas, Wipu Watcharakajorn, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich


Abstract
Automatic short answer scoring is a task whose aim is to help grade written works by learners of some subject matter. In niche subject domains with small examples, existing methods primarily utilized similarity-based scoring, relying on predefined reference answers to grade each student’s answer based on the similarity to the reference. However, these reference answers are often generated from a randomly selected set of graded student answer, which may fail to represent the full range of scoring variations. We propose a semi-automatic scoring framework that enhances the selective sampling strategy for defining the reference answers through a K-center-based and a K-means-based sampling method. Our results demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous similarity-based scoring methods on a dataset with Thai and English. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared to human reference performance and LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.sealp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop in South East Asian Language Processing
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Online
Editors:
Derry Wijaya, Alham Fikri Aji, Clara Vania, Genta Indra Winata, Ayu Purwarianti
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sealp | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
27–41
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.sealp-1.3/
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Cite (ACL):
Pachara Boonsarngsuk, Pacharapon Arpanantikul, Supakorn Hiranwipas, Wipu Watcharakajorn, and Ekapol Chuangsuwanich. 2025. Evaluating Sampling Strategies for Similarity-Based Short Answer Scoring: a Case Study in Thailand. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop in South East Asian Language Processing, pages 27–41, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Sampling Strategies for Similarity-Based Short Answer Scoring: a Case Study in Thailand (Boonsarngsuk et al., sealp 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.sealp-1.3.pdf