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arXiv · 2402.06584

G-SciEdBERT: A Contextualized LLM for Science Assessment Tasks in German

Ehsan Latif·Gyeong-Geon Lee·Knut Neumann·Tamara Kastorff·Xiaoming Zhai
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Abstract

The advancement of natural language processing has paved the way for automated scoring systems in various languages, such as German (e.g., German BERT [G-BERT]). Automatically scoring written responses to science questions in German is a complex task and challenging for standard G-BERT as they lack contextual knowledge in the science domain and may be unaligned with student writing styles. This paper presents a contextualized German Science Education BERT (G-SciEdBERT), an innovative large language model tailored for scoring German-written responses to science tasks and beyond. Using G-BERT, we pre-trained G-SciEdBERT on a corpus of 30K German written science responses with 3M tokens on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018. We fine-tuned G-SciEdBERT on an additional 20K student-written responses with 2M tokens and examined the scoring accuracy. We then compared its scoring performance with G-BERT. Our findings revealed a substantial improvement in scoring accuracy with G-SciEdBERT, demonstrating a 10.2% increase of quadratic weighted Kappa compared to G-BERT (mean difference = 0.1026, SD = 0.069). These insights underline the significance of specialized language models like G-SciEdBERT, which is trained to enhance the accuracy of contextualized automated scoring, offering a substantial contribution to the field of AI in education.

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Ehsan Latif, Gyeong-Geon Lee, Knut Neumann, Tamara Kastorff, Xiaoming Zhai. 2024-02-09. G-SciEdBERT: A Contextualized LLM for Science Assessment Tasks in German. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06584

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