# Reducing the Cost: Cross-Prompt Pre-Finetuning for Short Answer Scoring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13966/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Muppet: Massive Multi-task Representations with Pre-Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11038/) (2021)
- [Survey on Automated Short Answer Grading with Deep Learning: from Word Embeddings to Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03503/) (2022)
- [Get It Scored Using AutoSAS -- An Automated System for Scoring Short Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11243/) (2020)
- [Balancing Cost and Quality: An Exploration of Human-in-the-loop Frameworks for Automated Short Answer Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08288/) (2022)
- [Joint Multi-Domain Learning for Automatic Short Answer Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09183/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CoTAL: Human-in-the-Loop Prompt Engineering for Generalizable Formative Assessment Scoring and Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02323/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated Short Answer Scoring (SAS) is the task of automatically scoring a given input to a prompt based on rubrics and reference answers. Although SAS is useful in real-world applications, both rubrics and reference answers differ between prompts, thus requiring a need to acquire new data and train a model for each new prompt. Such requirements are costly, especially for schools and online courses where resources are limited and only a few prompts are used. In this work, we attempt to reduce this cost through a two-phase approach: train a model on existing rubrics and answers with gold score signals and finetune it on a new prompt. Specifically, given that scoring rubrics and reference answers differ for each prompt, we utilize key phrases, or representative expressions that the answer should contain to increase scores, and train a SAS model to learn the relationship between key phrases and answers using already annotated prompts (i.e., cross-prompts). Our experimental results show that finetuning on existing cross-prompt data with key phrases significantly improves scoring accuracy, especially when the training data is limited. Finally, our extensive analysis shows that it is crucial to design the model so that it can learn the task's general property.