Multiple Data Augmentation Strategies for Improving Performance on Automatic Short Answer Scoring

Abstract

Automatic short answer scoring (ASAS) is a research subject of intelligent education, which is a hot field of natural language understanding. Many experiments have confirmed that the ASAS system is not good enough, because its performance is limited by the training data. Focusing on the problem, we propose MDA-ASAS, multiple data augmentation strategies for improving performance on automatic short answer scoring. MDA-ASAS is designed to learn language representation enhanced by data augmentation strategies, which includes back-translation, correct answer as reference answer, and swap content. We argue that external knowledge has a profound impact on the ASAS process. Meanwhile, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks, which acquires more semantic, grammatical and other features in large amounts of unsupervised data, and actually adds external knowledge. Combining with the latest BERT model, our experimental results on the ASAS dataset show that MDA-ASAS brings a significant gain over state-of-art. We also perform extensive ablation studies and suggest parameters for practical use.