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Many Hands Make Light Work: Using Essay Traits to Automatically Score Essays
Journal
NAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
Date Issued
2022-01-01
Author(s)
Kumar, Rahul
Mathias, Sandeep
Saha, Sriparna
Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
Abstract
Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been little work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays using a multi-task learning (MTL) approach, where scoring the essay holistically is the primary task, and scoring the essay traits is the auxiliary task. We compare our results with a single-task learning (STL) approach, using both LSTMs and BiLSTMs. To find out which traits work best for different types of essays, we conduct ablation tests for each of the essay traits. We also report the runtime and number of training parameters for each system. We find that MTL-based BiLSTM system gives the best results for scoring the essay holistically, as well as performing well on scoring the essay traits. The MTL systems also give a speed-up of between 2.30 to 3.70 times the speed of the STL system, when it comes to scoring the essay and all the traits.