Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN) for Constructed Response Assessment and Feedback Grouping

Zhaohui Li, Susan Lloyd, Matthew Beckman, Rebecca Passonneau


Abstract
STEM educators must trade off the ease of assessing selected response (SR) questions, like multiple choice, with constructed response (CR) questions, where students articulate their own reasoning. Our work addresses a CR type new to NLP but common in college STEM, consisting of multiple questions per context. To relate the context, the questions, the reference responses, and students’ answers, we developed an Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN). In recurrent time-steps, relation vectors are learned for specific dependencies in a computational graph, where the nodes encode the distinct types of text input. AsRRN incorporates contrastive loss for better representation learning, which improves performance and supports student feedback. AsRRN was developed on a new dataset of 6,532 student responses to three, two-part CR questions. AsRRN outperforms classifiers based on LLMs, a previous relational network for CR questions, and few-shot learning with GPT-3.5. Ablation studies show the distinct contributions of AsRRN’s dependency structure, the number of time steps in the recurrence, and the contrastive loss.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.254
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3879–3891
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.254
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.254
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaohui Li, Susan Lloyd, Matthew Beckman, and Rebecca Passonneau. 2023. Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN) for Constructed Response Assessment and Feedback Grouping. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3879–3891, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN) for Constructed Response Assessment and Feedback Grouping (Li et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.254.pdf