Comment Text Grading for Chinese Graduate Academic Dissertation Using Attention Convolutional Neural Networks

Educational big data connects learning science with data science, where various educational problems are formulating into data mining tasks towards new solutions and new discoveries. This paper provides a path of automatically grading graduate academic dissertations according to the expert-given comment texts. The proposed method fed comment texts to an attention convolutional neural network consisted of an embedding layer, an attention mechanism layer, a convolutional layer, and a fully connected neural network, where the data imbalance issue was handled by data augmentations. The used comment texts were collected from 943 students spreading at 145 universities in China, where these review comments were yielded by experts to grade the academic dissertations. The results from the proposed method achieve a classification accuracy of 77% that gains 12% and 15% implementations compared to the classical convolutional neural network and the linear support vector machine. However, the result analyses show that there are many conflicts between expert-given comments and their given grades in the collected data. This study provides an automatic tool that could remove these conflicts in the dissertation review, leading to more objective dissertation grades.