{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/countering-the-influence-of-essay-length-in","title":"Countering the Influence of Essay Length in Neural Essay Scoring","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":"EMNLP (sustainlp) 2021 11","authors":["Sungho Jeon","Michael Strube"],"abstract":"Previous work has shown that automated essay scoring systems, in particular machine learning-based systems, are not capable of assessing the quality of essays, but are relying on essay length, a factor irrelevant to writing proficiency. In this work, we first show that state-of-the-art systems, recent neural essay scoring systems, might be also influenced by the correlation between essay length and scores in a standard dataset. In our evaluation, a very simple neural model shows the state-of-the-art performance on the standard dataset. To consider essay content without taking essay length into account, we introduce a simple neural model assessing the similarity of content between an input essay and essays assigned different scores. This neural model achieves performance comparable to the state of the art on a standard dataset as well as on a second dataset. Our findings suggest that neural essay scoring systems should consider the characteristics of datasets to focus on text quality.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.sustainlp-1.4","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.sustainlp-1.4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"countering-the-influence-of-essay-length-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/sdeva14/sustai21-counter-neural-essay-length","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automated-essay-scoring","task_name":"Automated Essay Scoring"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/automated-essay-scoring-on-asap","task":"Automated Essay Scoring","dataset":"ASAP-AES","model":"Considering-Content-XLNet","rank_in_archive_order":3,"of":8,"metrics":{"Quadratic Weighted Kappa":"0.786"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}