Investigating Methods to Detect Off-Topic Essays

Abstract

Automated Essay Scoring is one of the most important educational applications of natural language processing. It helps teachers with automatic assessments, providing a cheaper, faster, and more deterministic approach than humans when scoring essays. Nevertheless, off-topic essays pose challenges in this area, causing an automated grader to overestimate the score of an essay that does not adhere to a proposed topic. Thus, detecting off-topic essays is important for dealing with unrelated text responses to a given topic. This paper explored approaches based on handcrafted features to feed supervised machine-learning algorithms, tuning a BERT model, and prompt engineering with a large language model. We assessed these strategies in a public corpus of Portuguese essays, achieving the best result using a fine-tuned BERT model with a 75% balanced accuracy. Furthermore, this strategy was able to identify low-quality essays.