Your Answer is Incorrect... Would you like to know why? Introducing a Bilingual Short Answer Feedback Dataset

Abstract

Handing in a paper or exercise and merely receiving a "bad" or "incorrect" as feedback is not very helpful when the goal is to improve. Unfortunately, this is currently the kind of feedback given by many Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) systems. One of the reasons for this is a lack of content-focused elaborated feedback datasets. To encourage research on explainable and understandable feedback systems, we present the Short Answer Feedback dataset (SAF). Similar to other ASAG datasets, SAF contains learner responses and reference answers to German and English questions. However, instead of only assigning a label or score to the learners' answers, SAF also contains elaborated feedback explaining the given score. Thus, SAF enables supervised training of models that grade answers and explain where and why mistakes were made. This paper discusses the need for enhanced feedback models in real-world pedagogical scenarios, describes the dataset annotation process, gives a comprehensive analysis of SAF, and demonstrates how SAF challenges T5 Transformer models.

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