Can AI grade your essays? A comparative analysis of large language models and teacher ratings in multidimensional essay scoring

The manual assessment and grading of student writing is a time-consuming yet critical task for teachers. Recent developments in generative AI, such as large language models, offer potential solutions to facilitate essay-scoring tasks for teachers. In our study, we evaluate the performance and reliability of both open-source and closed-source LLMs in assessing German student essays, comparing their evaluations to those of 37 teachers across 10 pre-defined criteria (i.e., plot logic, expression). A corpus of 20 real-world essays from Year 7 and 8 students was analyzed using five LLMs: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, o1, LLaMA 3-70B, and Mixtral 8x7B, aiming to provide in-depth insights into LLMs' scoring capabilities. Closed-source GPT models outperform open-source models in both internal consistency and alignment with human ratings, particularly excelling in language-related criteria. The novel o1 model outperforms all other LLMs, achieving Spearman's $r = .74$ with human assessments in the overall score, and an internal consistency of $ICC=.80$. These findings indicate that LLM-based assessment can be a useful tool to reduce teacher workload by supporting the evaluation of essays, especially with regard to language-related criteria. However, due to their tendency for higher scores, the models require further refinement to better capture aspects of content quality.

Web Table Classification based on Visual Features

Tables on the web constitute a valuable data source for many applications, like factual search and knowledge base augmentation. However, as genuine tables containing relational knowledge only account for a small proportion of tables on the web, reliable genuine web table classification is a crucial first step of table extraction. Previous works usually rely on explicit feature construction from the HTML code. In contrast, we propose an approach for web table classification by exploiting the full visual appearance of a table, which works purely by applying a convolutional neural network on the rendered image of the web table. Since these visual features can be extracted automatically, our approach circumvents the need for explicit feature construction. A new hand labeled gold standard dataset containing HTML source code and images for 13,112 tables was generated for this task. Transfer learning techniques are applied to well known VGG16 and ResNet50 architectures. The evaluation of CNN image classification with fine tuned ResNet50 (F1 93.29%) shows that this approach achieves results comparable to previous solutions using explicitly defined HTML code based features. By combining visual and explicit features, an F-measure of 93.70% can be achieved by Random Forest classification, which beats current state of the art methods.