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Pre-training BERT on domain resources for short answer grading

  • Chul Sung
  • , Tengfei Ma
  • , Tejas Indulal Dhamecha
  • , Vinay Reddy
  • , Swarnadeep Saha
  • , Rishi Arora
  • IBM
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

101 Scopus citations

Abstract

Pre-trained BERT contextualized representations have achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple downstream NLP tasks by fine-tuning with task-specific data. While there has been a lot of focus on task-specific fine-tuning, there has been limited work on improving the pre-trained representations. In this paper, we explore ways of improving the pre-trained contextual representations for the task of automatic short answer grading, a critical component of intelligent tutoring systems. We show that the pre-trained BERT model can be improved by augmenting data from the domain-specific resources like textbooks. We also present a new approach to use labeled short answering grading data for further enhancement of the language model. Empirical evaluation on multi-domain datasets shows that task-specific fine-tuning on the enhanced pre-trained language model achieves superior performance for short answer grading.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages6071-6075
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781950737901
StatePublished - 2019
Event2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: Nov 3 2019Nov 7 2019

Publication series

NameEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 - 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period11/3/1911/7/19

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