Flexible domain adaptation for automated essay scoring using correlated linear regression

Abstract

Most of the current automated essay scoring (AES) systems are trained using manually graded essays from a specific prompt. These systems experience a drop in accuracy when used to grade an essay from a different prompt. Obtaining a large number of manually graded essays each time a new prompt is introduced is costly and not viable. We propose domain adaptation as a solution to adapt an AES system from an initial prompt to a new prompt. We also propose a novel domain adaptation technique that uses Bayesian linear ridge regression. We evaluate our domain adaptation technique on the publicly available Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) dataset and show that our proposed technique is a competitive default domain adaptation algorithm for the AES task.