Unsupervised Learning of Discourse-Aware Text Representation for Essay Scoring

Abstract

Existing document embedding approaches mainly focus on capturing sequences of words in documents. However, some document classification and regression tasks such as essay scoring need to consider discourse structure of documents. Although some prior approaches consider this issue and utilize discourse structure of text for document classification, these approaches are dependent on computationally expensive parsers. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach to capture discourse structure in terms of coherence and cohesion for document embedding that does not require any expensive parser or annotation. Extrinsic evaluation results show that the document representation obtained from our approach improves the performance of essay Organization scoring and Argument Strength scoring.