Enhancing Automated Essay Scoring with Three Techniques: Two-Stage Fine-Tuning, Score Alignment, and Self-Training

2026-02-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the critical challenge of scarce labeled data in real-world automated essay scoring (AES) scenarios, which severely limits model performance. To overcome this bottleneck, the authors propose a novel three-stage approach that integrates low-rank adaptation fine-tuning, score distribution alignment, and uncertainty-guided self-training—unifying two-stage fine-tuning, prediction-to-ground-truth score alignment, and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling for the first time. Built upon the DualBERT architecture, the method achieves 91.2% of the full-data (approximately 1,000 essays) performance using only 32 annotated samples. Moreover, under the full-data setting, the proposed score alignment strategy sets a new state-of-the-art result, significantly alleviating the data scarcity problem in low-resource AES.

Technology Category

Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty QuantificationNatural Language Processing: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, etc.Search and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for rankingEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Humans versus LLMs for data annotation and labelingSemantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in education by providing scalable and efficient assessment tools. However, in real-world settings, the extreme scarcity of labeled data severely limits the development and practical adoption of robust AES systems. This study proposes a novel approach to enhance AES performance in both limited-data and full-data settings by introducing three key techniques. First, we introduce a Two-Stage fine-tuning strategy that leverages low-rank adaptations to better adapt an AES model to target prompt essays. Second, we introduce a Score Alignment technique to improve consistency between predicted and true score distributions. Third, we employ uncertainty-aware self-training using unlabeled data, effectively expanding the training set with pseudo-labeled samples while mitigating label noise propagation. We implement above three key techniques on DualBERT. We conduct extensive experiments on the ASAP++ dataset. As a result, in the 32-data setting, all three key techniques improve performance, and their integration achieves 91.2% of the full-data performance trained on approximately 1,000 labeled samples. In addition, the proposed Score Alignment technique consistently improves performance in both limited-data and full-data settings: e.g., it achieves state-of-the-art results in the full-data setting when integrated into DualBERT.

Problem

• Automated Essay Scoring
• labeled data scarcity
• low-resource setting
• score consistency
• educational assessment

Innovation

• Two-Stage Fine-Tuning
• Score Alignment
• Self-Training
• Low-Rank Adaptation
• Automated Essay Scoring