Writing is a very important skillset. However, a very small portion of the population is good at this essential skill. According to an assessment by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, less than a third of high-school students are proficient writers. This number is even lower for people belonging to certain backgrounds. This problem creates a problem whose solution can provide tremendous benefits to people and can help democratize education.
While there are various automated writing feedback tools, they all have their own limitations such as but not limited to-
- Failing to identify writing structures or not being able to do it well enough.
- Proprietary Technology.
- Highly costly.
To address these issues, Georgia State University and The Learning Agency Lab, an independent nonprofit based in Arizona, are focused on developing science of learning-based tools and programs for social good.
The Competition
In this competition, you’ll identify elements in student writing. More specifically, you will automatically segment texts and classify argumentative and rhetorical elements in essays written by 6th-12th grade students. You’ll have access to the largest dataset of student writing ever released in order to test your skills in natural language processing, a fast-growing area of data science.
This is a code competition, hence in this competition, you have to submit the code which will be run against an unseen dataset of about 10k documents. Your task is to predict the human annotations. You will first need to segment each essay into discrete rhetorical and argumentative elements (i.e., discourse elements) and then classify each element as one of the following-
- Lead – an introduction that begins with a statistic, a quotation, a description, or some other device to grab the reader’s attention and point toward the thesis
- Position – an opinion or conclusion on the main question
- Claim – a claim that supports the position
- Counterclaim – a claim that refutes another claim or gives an opposing reason to the position
- Rebuttal – a claim that refutes a counterclaim
- Evidence – ideas or examples that support claims, counterclaims, or rebuttals.
- Concluding Statement – a concluding statement that restates the claims
If your solution is good, not only will you be winning prize money, but you’ll also make it easier for students to receive feedback on their writing and increase opportunities to improve writing outcomes. The open-sourced algorithms you come up with will allow any educational organization to better help young writers develop.
Submissions are evaluated on the overlap between ground truth and predicted word indices.
Timelines
The competition began on 14th December 2021. And while the final submission deadline is on 15th March 2022, the deadline for entry into the competition and team merger is 8th March 2022. So far, there are already 949 competitors from 837 teams who have made 6326 entries.
Prizes
Georgia State University and The Learning Agency Lab are handing out big prizes to top 12 finishers in the competition. The table below summarises about the prize money that will be handed out to each of the 12 finishers-
| Position | Prize |
|---|---|
| 1st | $40,000 |
| 2nd | $35,000 |
| 3rd | $25,000 |
| 4th | $15,000 |
| 5th | $10,000 |
| 6th-12th | $5,000 each |
This makes the total prize sum being awarded in the competition $160,000.
To be a part of the Georgia State University Feedback Prize – Evaluating Student Writing Challenge, you just need to have a Kaggle Account. To know more about this challenge and participate in it, click here.
Good Luck!
Other Challenges
Help Protect the Great Barrier Reef and win total prizes worth $150,000
Can You Forecast Crypto Prices With ML? Here Is Competition For You!