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Enhancing Auto-scoring of Student Open Responses in the Presence of Mathematical Terms and Expressions

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Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13355))

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Abstract

Prior works have led to the development and application of automated assessment methods that leverage machine learning and natural language processing. The performance of these methods have often been reported as being positive, but other prior works have identified aspects on which they may be improved. Particularly in the context of mathematics, the presence of non-linguistic characters and expressions have been identified to contribute to observed model error. In this paper, we build upon this prior work by observing a developed automated assessment model for open-response questions in mathematics. We develop a new approach which we call the “Math Term Frequency” (MTF) model to address this issue caused by the presence of non-linguistic terms and ensemble it with the previously-developed assessment model. We observe that the inclusion of this approach notably improves model performance, and present an example of practice of how error analyses can be leveraged to address model limitations.

S. Baral and K. Seetharaman—Both authors contributed equally to this research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All code used in this work is available at https://github.com/ASSISTments/SBERT-MTF.

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Acknowledgements

We thank multiple grants (e.g., 1917808, 1931523, 1940236, 1917713, 1903304, 1822830, 1759229, 1724889, 1636782, 1535428, 1440753, 1316736, 1252297, 1109483, & DRL-1031398); IES R305A170137, R305A170243, R305A180401, R305A120125, R305A180401, & R305C100024, P200A180088 & P200A150306, as well as N00014-18-1-2768, Schmidt Futures and a second anonymous philanthropy.

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Baral, S., Seetharaman, K., Botelho, A.F., Wang, A., Heineman, G., Heffernan, N.T. (2022). Enhancing Auto-scoring of Student Open Responses in the Presence of Mathematical Terms and Expressions. In: Rodrigo, M.M., Matsuda, N., Cristea, A.I., Dimitrova, V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13355. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11644-5_68

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11644-5_68

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