BY Liew Wei Pyn and Prannaya Gupta
Done for the CS5131 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Final Project
Domain: Literature, Education, English
Subject Area: Natural Language Processing, Deep Neural Network, BERT, Transformers, Transfer Learning, Sequential Sentence Classification
Argumentative Essays usually include a plethora of different essay elements that are quite difficult for the average student to identify. These include, but are not strictly limited to, Lead, Position, Claim, Counterclaim, Rebuttal, Evidence, Concluding Statement.
For instance, given a passage such as the following:
Although the history of human invention spans over millennia, there have been relatively few game-changing technologies. From the manipulation of fire back in the primal age to the invention of the electronic transistor in the 1940s, these monumental developments have often been followed up by fervent exploration and a burgeoning of new technologies that stem from that initial spark.
Here, you can state that this paragraph is the Lede, or the Lead. It is the statement of facts prior to a statement of opinion, and this is a very objective set of statements.
However, after this, the author writes the following:
While some may say Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is akin to these other inventions, I beg to disagree.
This is a Position, as can be said from the subjective statement of opinion, which has yet to be substantiated by fact or evidence. However, in a different context, this can be classified as a Rebuttal as well, since it started by giving an alternate perspective and then admitting that this is not something that matches up with the perspective of the author.
This contradiction can often cause confusion in modern machine learning models, since they may classify sentences without keeping track of context. Context is quite important in Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tasks, which is something many models would not excel at.
Often, students struggling with or generally writing essays use automated writing feedback tools, which, while numerous, each have their own limitations. Many of these feedback tools are unable to identify writing structures in essays, or are at least very inaccurate in their identification. Many of these tools are proprietary, with algorithms and feature claims that cannot be backed up independently, and more importantly, that are inaccessible to educators due to high costs.
In addition, automatically and consistently identifying and highlighting such elements, that too amongst hundreds of scripts, can be a tedious task for teachers, who may wish not to use these tools due to, in summary, their high levels of inaccuracy, lacking features and high costs.
Objective(s): Developing a model capable of analyzing essay elements in argumentative pieces
- Teachers aiming to help their students improve their writing
- Students aiming to improve their writing to prepare for the A Level GP and University Preparation
| Timeline | Project Plan |
|---|---|
| 28-1st February | Load and prepare dataset |
| 2-20th February | Try different Hugging Face supported models (GPT2, BERT etc.), and evaluate their performances |
| 20-28th February | Create a frontend GUI |
| 1st March | Mid-Way project review |
| 2-20th March | Buffer time, pray we don’t need it |
| 21-29th March | Report and Presentation |
- PyTorch
- GPUs
- Google Colaboratory
- Hugging Face
- Fast.AI
A model capable of analysing and identifying the key argumentative elements in an English essay. We can possibly test it on real-life samples like model essays from teachers at NUS High.
- Feedback Prize - Evaluating Student Writing (Kaggle Competition, Georgia State University)
- Zaheer, M., Guruganesh, G., Dubey, A., Ainslie, J., Alberti, C., Ontanon, S., … Ahmed, A. (2021). Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences. arXiv [cs.LG]. Opgehaal van http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.14062
- Cohan, A., Beltagy, I., King, D., Dalvi, B., & Weld, D. (2019). Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.04054.pdf
- Beltagy, I., Peters, M. E., & Cohan, A. (2020). Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer. arXiv [cs.CL]. Opgehaal van http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05150
- Press, O., Smith, N. A., & Lewis, M. (2021). Shortformer: Better Language Modeling using Shorter Inputs. arXiv [cs.CL]. Opgehaal van http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15832