Topicality-Based Indices for Essay Scoring

In this paper, we address the problem of quantifying the overall extent to which a testtaker’s essay deals with the topic it is assigned (prompt). We experiment with a number of models for word topicality, and a number of approaches for aggregating word-level indices into text-level ones. All models are evaluated for their ability to predict the holistic quality of essays. We show that the best texttopicality model provides a significant improvement in a state-of-art essay scoring system. We also show that the findings of the relative merits of different models generalize well across three different datasets.