A Neural Approach to Automated Essay Scoring

Traditional automated essay scoring systems rely on carefully designed features to evaluate and score essays. The performance of such systems is tightly bound to the quality of the underlying features. However, it is laborious to manually design the most informative features for such a system. In this paper, we develop an approach based on recurrent neural networks to learn the relation between an essay and its assigned score, without any feature engineering. We explore several neural network models for the task of automated essay scoring and perform some analysis to get some insights of the models. The results show that our best system, which is based on long short-term memory networks, outperforms a strong baseline by 5.6% in terms of quadratic weighted Kappa, without requiring any feature engineering.