It was a super lovely experience to present one of my papers, “Retrieving key topical sentences with topic-aware BERT when conducting automated essay scoring“, at the 12th International Conference on Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (MIS4TEL) at L’Aquila, Italy. 

The paper is investigated how we can achieve something beyond a predicted score from an automated essay scoring (AES) system. We proposed a topic-aware BERT-based method, achieving robust AES performance compared to the SOTA models. Meanwhile, we looked at the self-attention maps in each transformer neural layer to retrieve key topical sentences that could facilitate teachers’ grading activities. 

The MIS4TEL conference was very well organised, together with co-located conference regarding AI, Blockchain and Multi-agent intelligent systems. It was an unforgettable experience to chat with scholars from other domains and establish friendships.