# Mitigating Bias in Automated Essay Scoring for ESL Learners via Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16724 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16724/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [FairFil: Contrastive Neural Debiasing Method for Pretrained Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06413/) (2021)
- [Unveiling the Tapestry of Automated Essay Scoring: A Comprehensive Investigation of Accuracy, Fairness, and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05655/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated Essay Scoring systems disproportionately penalize high-proficiency English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. We propose Contrastive Learning with Matched Essay Pairs (CL-MEP), a bi-directional alignment strategy. CL-MEP reduces this scoring bias by 39.9% while improving overall accuracy, successfully disentangling valid syntactic complexity from surface-level grammatical errors.