Automatic Detection of Off-topic Documents using ConceptNet and Essay Prompt in Automated English Essay Scoring

This work presents a new method that can predict, without the use of training data, whether an input essay is written on a given topic. ConceptNet is a common-sense knowledge base that is generated automatically from sentences that are extracted from a variety of document types. An essay prompt is the topic that an essay should be written about. The method that is proposed in this paper uses ConceptNet and an essay prompt to decide whether or not an input essay is off-topic. We introduce a way to find the shortest path between two nodes on ConceptNet, as well as a way to calculate the semantic similarity between two nodes. Not only an essay prompt but also a student's essay can be represented by concept nodes in ConceptNet. The semantic similarity between the concepts that represent an essay prompt and the other concepts that represent a student's essay can be used for a calculation to rank "on-topicness" ; if a low ranking is derived, an essay is regarded as off-topic. We used eight different essay prompts and a student-essay collection for the performance evaluation, whereby our proposed method shows a performance that is better than those of the previous studies. As ConceptNet enables the conduction of a simple text inference, our new method looks very promising with respect to the design of an essay prompt for which a simple inference is required.