Automatic Essay Scoring in a Brazilian Scenario

This paper presents a novel Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) algorithm tailored for the Portuguese-language essays of Brazil's Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM), addressing the challenges in traditional human grading systems. Our approach leverages advanced deep learning techniques to align closely with human grading criteria, targeting efficiency and scalability in evaluating large volumes of student essays. This research not only responds to the logistical and financial constraints of manual grading in Brazilian educational assessments but also promises to enhance fairness and consistency in scoring, marking a significant step forward in the application of AES in large-scale academic settings.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures and 4 table

Church, State, and Politics in Latin America

This course has two central objectives: 1) to provide students with an understanding of the evolving role of religion in Latin American politics, with a primary emphasis on the role of Catholicism and the Catholic Church from the period of the Second Vatican Council until the present; and 2) to provide students an opportunity to reflect on the normative questions of how religious beliefs and religious institutions should affect politics and of how different political systems and state policies should affect the practice of religion. The major themes, to be examined through both Catholic and non-Catholic perspectives, include the institutional relationship between the Catholic Church and the state, the different political expressions of Catholicism (from those inspired by Liberation Theology to supporters of Christian Democratic or Conservative political parties), the persecution of the Church under certain authoritarian regimes and the Catholic response, the rise of religious and political pluralism, and the role of religion in contemporary politics and public policy

DIPL 6806 Political Economy of Latin America and the Caribbean

This seminar provides an overview of major approaches to the study of political economy in Latin America and the Caribbean, past and present development trends, and recent debates over economic policy. The course begins with classic questions of the mutual reciprocal relations between politics and economics before covering the major debates between structural and institutional approaches. It proceeds by examining the switch from import-substituting industrialization to export-led growth models in the 1980s and 1990s and the effects of and reactions to the rise of neoliberal economic policies and then the commodity boom, as well as race and racism in the Americas. The topics of the last five weeks, to be determined in consultation with students, will include a variety of current policy issues. Course readings balance theory and empirics, range across methodologies and academic disciplines, and (usually) provide contrasting normative perspectives

DIPL 2110 AA/AB Comparative Foreign Policy

This course is an introduction to theories of foreign policy analysis and a survey of the foreign policies of major states. The first part of the course examines alternative theoretical approaches to how states formulate and implement their foreign policies. These conceptual models are then applied to a series of seminal events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second part of the course examines the foreign policy trajectories of a number of important international actors and explores critical cases through simulations

Political Economy of Latin America and the Caribbean

This seminar provides an overview of major approaches to the study of political economy in Latin America, past and present development trends, and recent debates over economic policy. The course begins with classic questions of the mutual reciprocal relations between politics and economics before covering the major debates between structural and institutional approaches. It proceeds by examining the switch from import-substituting industrialization to export-led growth models in the 1980s and 1990s as well as the effects of and reactions to the rise of neoliberal economic policies. The last several weeks examine new reform efforts in industry, agriculture, finance, and administration as well as the recent economic downturn. Course readings balance theory and empirics, range across methodologies and academic disciplines, and provide contrasting normative perspectives

Experimental Evidence on Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

This paper investigates how technologies that use different combinations of artificial and human intelligence are incorporated into classroom instruction, and how they ultimately affect students' outcomes. We conducted a field experiment to study two technologies that allow teachers to outsource grading and feedback tasks on writing practices. The first technology is a fully automated evaluation system that provides instantaneous scores and feedback. The second one uses human graders as an additional resource to enhance grading and feedback quality in aspects in which the automated system arguably falls short. Both technologies significantly improved students' essay scores, and the additional inputs from human graders did not improve effectiveness. Furthermore, the technologies similarly helped teachers engage more frequently on nonroutine tasks that supported the individualization of pedagogy. Our results are informative about the potential of artificial intelligence to expand the set of tasks that can be automated, and on how advances in artificial intelligence may relocate human labor to tasks that remain out of reach of automation

Prompt- and Trait Relation-aware Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring

Automated essay scoring (AES) aims to score essays written for a given prompt, which defines the writing topic. Most existing AES systems assume to grade essays of the same prompt as used in training and assign only a holistic score. However, such settings conflict with real-education situations; pre-graded essays for a particular prompt are lacking, and detailed trait scores of sub-rubrics are required. Thus, predicting various trait scores of unseen-prompt essays (called cross-prompt essay trait scoring) is a remaining challenge of AES. In this paper, we propose a robust model: prompt- and trait relation-aware cross-prompt essay trait scorer. We encode prompt-aware essay representation by essay-prompt attention and utilizing the topic-coherence feature extracted by the topic-modeling mechanism without access to labeled data; therefore, our model considers the prompt adherence of an essay, even in a cross-prompt setting. To facilitate multi-trait scoring, we design trait-similarity loss that encapsulates the correlations of traits. Experiments prove the efficacy of our model, showing state-of-the-art results for all prompts and traits. Significant improvements in low-resource-prompt and inferior traits further indicate our model's strength.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023 (Findings, long paper