On the Use of Bert for Automated Essay Scoring: Joint Learning of Multi-Scale Essay Representation
Yongjie Wang, Chuang Wang, Ruobing Li, Hui Lin · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · 2022
In recent years, pre-trained models have become dominant in most natural language processing (NLP) tasks.However, in the area of Automated Essay Scoring (AES), pre-trained models such as BERT have not been properly used to outperform other deep learning models such as LSTM.In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-scale essay representation for BERT that can be jointly learned.We also employ multiple losses and transfer learning from out-of-domain essays to further improve the performance.Experiment results show that our approach derives much benefit from joint learning of multi-scale essay representation and obtains almost the state-of-the-art result among all deep learning models in the ASAP 1 task.Our multi-scale essay representation also generalizes well to CommonLit Readability Prize (CRP 2 ) data set, which suggests that the novel text representation proposed in this paper may be a new and effective choice for long-text tasks.