CLAIFeb 13, 2025

Improve LLM-based Automatic Essay Scoring with Linguistic Features

arXiv:2502.09497v113 citationsh-index: 2
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This work aims to improve the accuracy and efficiency of automatic essay scoring for educators, particularly for essays from diverse prompts, by enhancing LLM-based methods.

This paper addresses the challenge of Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) across diverse prompts by combining linguistic features with LLM-based scoring. The hybrid method demonstrated superior performance compared to baseline models for both in-domain and out-of-domain writing prompts.

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) assigns scores to student essays, reducing the grading workload for instructors. Developing a scoring system capable of handling essays across diverse prompts is challenging due to the flexibility and diverse nature of the writing task. Existing methods typically fall into two categories: supervised feature-based approaches and large language model (LLM)-based methods. Supervised feature-based approaches often achieve higher performance but require resource-intensive training. In contrast, LLM-based methods are computationally efficient during inference but tend to suffer from lower performance. This paper combines these approaches by incorporating linguistic features into LLM-based scoring. Experimental results show that this hybrid method outperforms baseline models for both in-domain and out-of-domain writing prompts.

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