@inproceedings{kim-etal-2026-interpretability,
title = "Interpretability from the Ground Up: Stakeholder-Centric Design of Automated Scoring in Educational Assessments",
author = "Kim, Yunsung and
Hardy, Michael and
Tey, Joseph and
Thille, Candace and
Piech, Christopher J",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1859/",
pages = "37313--37328",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "AI-driven automated scoring systems offer scalable and efficient means of evaluating complex student-generated responses. Yet, despite increasing demand for transparency and interpretability, the field has yet to develop a widely accepted solution for interpretable automated scoring to be used in large-scale real-world assessments. This work takes a principled approach to address this challenge. We analyze the needs and potential benefits of interpretable automated scoring for various assessment stakeholder groups and develop four principles of interpretability {--} (F)aithfulness, (G)roundedness, (T)raceability, and (I)nterchangeability (FGTI) {--} targeted at those needs. To illustrate the feasibility of implementing these principles, we develop the AnalyticScore framework as a baseline reference framework. When applied to the domain of text-based constructed-response scoring, AnalyticScore outperforms many uninterpretable scoring methods in terms of scoring accuracy and is, on average, within 0.06 QWK of the uninterpretable SOTA across 10 items from the ASAP-SAS dataset. By comparing against human annotators conducting the same featurization task, we further demonstrate that the featurization behavior of AnalyticScore aligns well with that of humans."
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<abstract>AI-driven automated scoring systems offer scalable and efficient means of evaluating complex student-generated responses. Yet, despite increasing demand for transparency and interpretability, the field has yet to develop a widely accepted solution for interpretable automated scoring to be used in large-scale real-world assessments. This work takes a principled approach to address this challenge. We analyze the needs and potential benefits of interpretable automated scoring for various assessment stakeholder groups and develop four principles of interpretability – (F)aithfulness, (G)roundedness, (T)raceability, and (I)nterchangeability (FGTI) – targeted at those needs. To illustrate the feasibility of implementing these principles, we develop the AnalyticScore framework as a baseline reference framework. When applied to the domain of text-based constructed-response scoring, AnalyticScore outperforms many uninterpretable scoring methods in terms of scoring accuracy and is, on average, within 0.06 QWK of the uninterpretable SOTA across 10 items from the ASAP-SAS dataset. By comparing against human annotators conducting the same featurization task, we further demonstrate that the featurization behavior of AnalyticScore aligns well with that of humans.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Interpretability from the Ground Up: Stakeholder-Centric Design of Automated Scoring in Educational Assessments
%A Kim, Yunsung
%A Hardy, Michael
%A Tey, Joseph
%A Thille, Candace
%A Piech, Christopher J.
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F kim-etal-2026-interpretability
%X AI-driven automated scoring systems offer scalable and efficient means of evaluating complex student-generated responses. Yet, despite increasing demand for transparency and interpretability, the field has yet to develop a widely accepted solution for interpretable automated scoring to be used in large-scale real-world assessments. This work takes a principled approach to address this challenge. We analyze the needs and potential benefits of interpretable automated scoring for various assessment stakeholder groups and develop four principles of interpretability – (F)aithfulness, (G)roundedness, (T)raceability, and (I)nterchangeability (FGTI) – targeted at those needs. To illustrate the feasibility of implementing these principles, we develop the AnalyticScore framework as a baseline reference framework. When applied to the domain of text-based constructed-response scoring, AnalyticScore outperforms many uninterpretable scoring methods in terms of scoring accuracy and is, on average, within 0.06 QWK of the uninterpretable SOTA across 10 items from the ASAP-SAS dataset. By comparing against human annotators conducting the same featurization task, we further demonstrate that the featurization behavior of AnalyticScore aligns well with that of humans.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1859/
%P 37313-37328
Markdown (Informal)
[Interpretability from the Ground Up: Stakeholder-Centric Design of Automated Scoring in Educational Assessments](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1859/) (Kim et al., Findings 2026)
ACL