AIED2017: Wise Crowd Content Assessment and Educational Rubrics by Rebecca J. Passonneau

Today, our professor, Rebecca J. Passonneau, gave a great presentation in the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED2017), hosted by the International AIED Society in Wuhan, China from June 28th to July 2nd, 2017! 👏

Wise Crowd Content Assessment and Educational Rubrics

Rebecca J. Passonneau, Ananya Poddar, Gaurav Gite, Alisa Krivokapic, Qian Yang and Dolores Perin

Development of reliable rubrics for educational intervention studies that address reading and writing skills is labor-intensive, and could benefit from an automated approach. We compare a main ideas rubric used in a successful writing intervention study to a highly reliable wise-crowd content assessment method developed to evaluate machine-generated summaries. The ideas in the educational rubric were extracted from a source text that students were asked to summarize. The wise-crowd content assessment model is derived from summaries written by an independent group of proficient students who read the same source text, and followed the same instructions to write their summaries. The resulting content model includes a ranking over the derived content units. All main ideas in the rubric appear prominently in the wise-crowd content model. We present two methods that automate the content assessment. Scores based on the wise-crowd content assessment, both manual and automated, have high correlations with the main ideas rubric. The automated content assessment methods have several advantages over related methods, including high correlations with corresponding manual scores, a need for only half a dozen models instead of hundreds, and interpretable scores that independently assess content quality and coverage.

You can learn more about the presentation in the conference's program and the relevant paper. The presentation was part of a new "Journal Track" paper session that was initiated this year for papers that appeared in IJAIED and had not been presented at any conference.

After the day was over, Rebecca Passonneau, Dolores Perin, Barbara di Eugenio & our labmate Yanjun Gao had a nice lunch in beautiful Wuhan!

Find more about our collaborators' work here: Barbara di Eugenio & Dolores Perin, and of course our Yanjun Gao!