Enhancing automated essay scoring performance via fine-tuning pre-trained language models with combination of regression and ranking

Abstract

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a critical text regression task that automatically assigns scores to essays based on their writing quality. Recently, the performance of sentence prediction tasks has been largely improved by using Pre-trained Language Models via fusing representations from different layers, constructing an auxiliary sentence, using multi-task learning, etc. However, to solve the AES task, previous works utilize shallow neural networks to learn essay representations and constrain calculated scores with regression loss or ranking loss, respectively. Since shallow neural networks trained on limited samples show poor performance to capture deep semantic of texts. And without an accurate scoring function, ranking loss and regression loss measures two different aspects of the calculated scores. To improve AES’s performance, we find a new way to fine-tune pre-trained language models with multiple losses of the same task. In this paper, we propose to utilize a pre-trained language model to learn text representations first. With scores calculated from the representations, mean square error loss and the batch-wise ListNet loss with dynamic weights constrain the scores simultaneously. We utilize Quadratic Weighted Kappa to evaluate our model on the Automated Student Assessment Prize dataset. Our model outperforms not only state-of-the-art neural models near 3 percent but also the latest statistic model. Especially on the two narrative prompts, our model performs much better than all other state-of-the-art models.