Task-independent features for automated essay grading

Abstract

Automated scoring of student essays is increasingly used to reduce manual grading effort. State-of-the-art approaches use supervised machine learning which makes it complicated to transfer a system trained on one task to another. We investigate which currently used features are task-independent and evaluate their transferability on English and German datasets. We find that, by using our task-independent feature set, models transfer better between tasks. We also find that the transfer works even better between tasks of the same type.