Essay-BR: a Brazilian Corpus of Essays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large, publicly available Brazilian Portuguese essay corpus with expert scores, aiming to support automatic essay scoring research and address the language gap in AES studies.

Contribution

It presents the first extensive Brazilian Portuguese essay corpus with expert annotations, facilitating future AES research in this language.

Findings

Identified challenges in applying AES to Portuguese essays

Provided a benchmark dataset for future AES models in Portuguese

Demonstrated the corpus's potential for improving AES systems

Abstract

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written essays, aiming to provide computational models to grade essays either automatically or with minimal human involvement. While there are several AES studies in a variety of languages, few of them are focused on the Portuguese language. The main reason is the lack of a corpus with manually graded essays. In order to bridge this gap, we create a large corpus with several essays written by Brazilian high school students on an online platform. All of the essays are argumentative and were scored across five competencies by experts. Moreover, we conducted an experiment on the created corpus and showed challenges posed by the Portuguese language. Our corpus is publicly available at https://github.com/rafaelanchieta/essay.