Cognitively Aided Zero-Shot Automatic Essay Grading
This addresses the problem of grading essays on new prompts without training data for educators or automated systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing AEG methods.
The paper tackled zero-shot automatic essay grading by incorporating gaze behavior as cognitive information, resulting in an average performance improvement of almost 5 percentage points in QWK.
Automatic essay grading (AEG) is a process in which machines assign a grade to an essay written in response to a topic, called the prompt. Zero-shot AEG is when we train a system to grade essays written to a new prompt which was not present in our training data. In this paper, we describe a solution to the problem of zero-shot automatic essay grading, using cognitive information, in the form of gaze behaviour. Our experiments show that using gaze behaviour helps in improving the performance of AEG systems, especially when we provide a new essay written in response to a new prompt for scoring, by an average of almost 5 percentage points of QWK.