“A neural approach to automated essay scoring,”
Open accessAbstract
Traditional automated essay scoring systems rely on carefully designed features to evaluate and score essays.The performance of such systems is tightly bound to the quality of the underlying features.However, it is laborious to manually design the most informative features for such a system.In this paper, we develop an approach based on recurrent neural networks to learn the relation between an essay and its assigned score, without any feature engineering.We explore several neural network models for the task of automated essay scoring and perform some analysis to get some insights of the models.The results show that our best system, which is based on long short-term memory networks, outperforms a strong baseline by 5.6% in terms of quadratic weighted Kappa, without requiring any feature engineering.
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Over the last decade, AI-based essay grading tools evolved from using handcrafted features to automatically extracted features using deep neural network variants.
“Over the last decade, AI-based essay grading tools evolved from using handcrafted features such as word/sentence count, mean word/sentence length, n-grams, word error rates, POS tags, grammar, and punctuation (Adamson et al., 2014; Phandi et al., 2015; Cummins et al., 2016; Contreras et al., 2018) to automatically extracted features using deep neural network variants (Taghipour and Ng, 2016; Dasgu”
From Proactive and reactive engagement of artificial intelligence methods for education: a review (2023) · cites this paper as Taghipour and Ng, 2016
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WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts
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“…models can help in educational settings in a variety of ways: e.g., assisting in grading (Piech et al., 2013; Shermis, 2014; Kulkarni et al., 2014; Taghipour and Ng, 2016), estimating student knowledge and ability (Desmarais and Baker, 2012; Wu et al., 2020), identifying students who need…”
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“Other inputs include a short free form (e.g., a short sentence [12]), long free form (e.g., an essay [13]).”
BackgroundOn Automated Essay Grading using Large Language Models
Liew, P. Y., & Tan, I. K. T. (2024) · Proceedings of the 2024 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1145/3709026.3709030 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Comparing GPT-based approaches in automated writing evaluation
Liu, Y., Lu, X., & Qi, H. (2025) · Assessing Writing · doi:10.1016/j.asw.2025.100961 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Taghipour, K., & Ng, H. T.
- Affiliations
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- ORCID
- Taghipour, Kaveh
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Published
- 2016
- Pages
- 1882-1891
- OpenAlex
- W2567547739
- Cited by
- 537
- References
- 20
- Citations by year
- 2026: 64 · 2025: 68 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 74 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 59 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 53 · 2018: 43 · 2017: 11
- FWCI
- 30.14
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Educational Technology and Assessment
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Keywords
- automated essay scoring, artificial neural networks, writing assessment, natural language processing
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