Adversarial Topic-aware Prompt-tuning for Cross-topic Automated Essay Scoring

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Chunyun, Zhao, Hongyan, Cui, Chaoran, Song, Qilong, Lu, Zhiqing, Gong, Shuai, Liu, Kailin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916887320854528
author Zhang, Chunyun
Zhao, Hongyan
Cui, Chaoran
Song, Qilong
Lu, Zhiqing
Gong, Shuai
Liu, Kailin
author_facet Zhang, Chunyun
Zhao, Hongyan
Cui, Chaoran
Song, Qilong
Lu, Zhiqing
Gong, Shuai
Liu, Kailin
contents Cross-topic automated essay scoring (AES) aims to develop a transferable model capable of effectively evaluating essays on a target topic. A significant challenge in this domain arises from the inherent discrepancies between topics. While existing methods predominantly focus on extracting topic-shared features through distribution alignment of source and target topics, they often neglect topic-specific features, limiting their ability to assess critical traits such as topic adherence. To address this limitation, we propose an Adversarial TOpic-aware Prompt-tuning (ATOP), a novel method that jointly learns topic-shared and topic-specific features to improve cross-topic AES. ATOP achieves this by optimizing a learnable topic-aware prompt--comprising both shared and specific components--to elicit relevant knowledge from pre-trained language models (PLMs). To enhance the robustness of topic-shared prompt learning and mitigate feature scale sensitivity introduced by topic alignment, we incorporate adversarial training within a unified regression and classification framework. In addition, we employ a neighbor-based classifier to model the local structure of essay representations and generate pseudo-labels for target-topic essays. These pseudo-labels are then used to guide the supervised learning of topic-specific prompts tailored to the target topic. Extensive experiments on the publicly available ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that ATOP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both holistic and multi-trait essay scoring. The implementation of our method is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ATOP-A271.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Topic-aware Prompt-tuning for Cross-topic Automated Essay Scoring
Zhang, Chunyun
Zhao, Hongyan
Cui, Chaoran
Song, Qilong
Lu, Zhiqing
Gong, Shuai
Liu, Kailin
Computation and Language
Cross-topic automated essay scoring (AES) aims to develop a transferable model capable of effectively evaluating essays on a target topic. A significant challenge in this domain arises from the inherent discrepancies between topics. While existing methods predominantly focus on extracting topic-shared features through distribution alignment of source and target topics, they often neglect topic-specific features, limiting their ability to assess critical traits such as topic adherence. To address this limitation, we propose an Adversarial TOpic-aware Prompt-tuning (ATOP), a novel method that jointly learns topic-shared and topic-specific features to improve cross-topic AES. ATOP achieves this by optimizing a learnable topic-aware prompt--comprising both shared and specific components--to elicit relevant knowledge from pre-trained language models (PLMs). To enhance the robustness of topic-shared prompt learning and mitigate feature scale sensitivity introduced by topic alignment, we incorporate adversarial training within a unified regression and classification framework. In addition, we employ a neighbor-based classifier to model the local structure of essay representations and generate pseudo-labels for target-topic essays. These pseudo-labels are then used to guide the supervised learning of topic-specific prompts tailored to the target topic. Extensive experiments on the publicly available ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that ATOP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both holistic and multi-trait essay scoring. The implementation of our method is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ATOP-A271.
title Adversarial Topic-aware Prompt-tuning for Cross-topic Automated Essay Scoring
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05987