Inject rubrics into short answer grading system

Abstract

Short Answer Grading (SAG) is a task of scoring students' answers in examinations. Most existing SAG systems predict scores based only on the answers, including the model (Riordan et al., 2017) used as baseline in this paper, which gives the-state-of-the-art performance. But they ignore important evaluation criteria such as rubrics, which play a crucial role for evaluating answers in real-world situations. In this paper, we present a method to inject information from rubrics into SAG systems. We implement our approach on top of word-level attention mechanism to introduce the rubric information, in order to locate information in each answer that are highly related to the score. Our experimental results demonstrate that injecting rubric information effectively contributes to the performance improvement and that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art SAG model on the widely used ASAP-SAS dataset under low-resource settings.