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Improving the Generalization Ability in Essay Coherence Evaluation Through Monotonic Constraints

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Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14304))

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Abstract

Coherence is a crucial aspect of evaluating text readability and can be assessed through two primary factors when evaluating an essay in a scoring scenario. The first factor is logical coherence, characterized by the appropriate use of discourse connectives and the establishment of logical relationships between sentences. The second factor is the appropriateness of punctuation, as inappropriate punctuation can lead to confused sentence structure. To address these concerns, we propose a coherence scoring model consisting of a regression model with two feature extractors: a local coherence discriminative model and a punctuation correction model. We employ gradient-boosting regression trees as the regression model and impose monotonicity constraints on the input features. The results show that our proposed model better generalizes unseen data. The model achieved third place in track 1 of NLPCC 2023 shared task 7. Additionally, we briefly introduce our solution for the remaining tracks, which achieves second place for track 2 and first place for both track 3 and track 4.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by NSFC (62206070), the Innovation Fund Project of the Engineering Research Center of Integration and Application of Digital Learning Technology, Ministry of Education (1221014, 1221052), and National Key R &D Program of China (2021YFF0901005).

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Correspondence to Chen Zheng .

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Zheng, C., Zhang, H., Zhao, Y., Lai, Y. (2023). Improving the Generalization Ability in Essay Coherence Evaluation Through Monotonic Constraints. In: Liu, F., Duan, N., Xu, Q., Hong, Y. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14304. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44699-3_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44699-3_27

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