Automated Evaluation for Student Argumentative Writing: A Survey
It addresses the need for specific feedback to help students improve argumentation skills, but is incremental as it primarily organizes existing research.
The paper surveys automated evaluation methods for student argumentative writing, focusing on tasks, data, and methods, and experiments with BERT to establish updated baselines for the field.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in an under-studied area, which we call automated evaluation for student argumentative writing. Unlike traditional automated writing evaluation that focuses on holistic essay scoring, this field is more specific: it focuses on evaluating argumentative essays and offers specific feedback, including argumentation structures, argument strength trait score, etc. The focused and detailed evaluation is useful for helping students acquire important argumentation skill. In this paper we organize existing works around tasks, data and methods. We further experiment with BERT on representative datasets, aiming to provide up-to-date baselines for this field.