Cross-Prompt Automated Essay Scoring of Multiple Traits: Making Sense of the State of the Art

AbstractDespite the recent progress made in cross-prompt essay scoring, there is little analysis of what makes a state-of-the-art cross-prompt scorer work well. To this end, we present an empirical analysis of how the key components of a cross-prompt scorer interact with each other and impact its overall performance. In addition, we examine for the first time the application of transductive learning to cross-prompt scoring, which represents an important starting point for providing a practical way to improve cross-prompt scorers for use in the rarely-studied classroom setting without the need for additional labeled training data.