Automated Essay Scoring Incorporating Annotations from Automated Feedback Systems

Abstract: This study illustrates how incorporating feedback-oriented annotations into the scoring pipeline can enhance the accuracy of automated essay scoring (AES). This approach is demonstrated with the Persuasive Essays for Rating, Selecting, and Understanding Argumentative and Discourse Elements (PERSUADE) corpus. We integrate two types of feedback-driven annotations: those that identify spelling and grammatical errors, and those that highlight argumentative components. To illustrate how this method could be applied in real-world scenarios, we employ two LLMs to generate annotations -- a generative LLM used for spell-correction and an encoder-based token classifier trained to identify and mark argumentative elements. By incorporating annotations into the scoring process, we demonstrate improvements in performance using encoder-based LLMs fine-tuned as classifiers.