Neural Multi-task Learning in Automated Assessment

Grammatical error detection and automated essay scoring are two tasks in the area of automated assessment. Traditionally these tasks have been treated independently with different machine learning models and features used for each task. In this paper, we develop a multi-task neural network model that jointly optimises for both tasks, and in particular we show that neural automated essay scoring can be significantly improved. We show that while the essay score provides little evidence to inform grammatical error detection, the essay score is highly influenced by error detection.

Sentence Similarity Measures for Fine-Grained Estimation of Topical Relevance in Learner Essays

We investigate the task of assessing sentence-level prompt relevance in learner essays. Various systems using word overlap, neural embeddings and neural compositional models are evaluated on two datasets of learner writing. We propose a new method for sentence-level similarity calculation, which learns to adjust the weights of pre-trained word embeddings for a specific task, achieving substantially higher accuracy compared to other relevant baselines.