Domain-Specific Hybrid BERT based System for Automatic Short Answer Grading

Abstract

Effective and efficient grading has been recognized as an important issue in any educational institution. In this study, a grading system involving BERT for Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) is proposed. A BERT Regressor model is fine-tuned using a domain-specific ASAG dataset to achieve a baseline performance. In order to improve the final grading performance, an effective strategy is proposed involving careful integration of BERT Regressor model with Semantic Text Similarity. A set of experiments is conducted to test the performance of the proposed method. Two performance metrics namely: Pearson's Correlation Coefficient and Root Mean Squared Error are used for evaluation purposes. The results obtained highlights the usefulness of proposed system for domain specific ASAG tasks in real life.