Automated Essay Scoring Using Discourse External Knowledge

The Automated Essay Scoring (AES) task is an important NLP research problem given its significance for the education ecosystem. Recently, researchers started to apply a hybrid approach to this task. This hybrid approach incorporates into a deep learning model expert features that assess a particular dimension of the essay. Motivated by these successes, we propose to automatically assess essays using a hybrid approach that relies on external discourse knowledge. Our proposed model consists of using transformer-based embeddings to generate semantic representations of essays. Then, we incorporate several discourse features into these representations. Finally, we apply a linear classifier to generate the final score. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we have conducted extensive experiments using the Automated Student Assessment Prize dataset (ASAP). The performance of the proposed model has been evaluated using the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) metric. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in comparison with several existing solutions in literature.