  Off-topic spoken response detection, the task aiming at predicting whether a
response is off-topic for the corresponding prompt, is important for an
automated speaking assessment system. In many real-world educational
applications, off-topic spoken response detectors are required to achieve high
recall for off-topic responses not only on seen prompts but also on prompts
that are unseen during training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for
off-topic spoken response detection with high off-topic recall on both seen and
unseen prompts. We introduce a new model, Gated Convolutional Bidirectional
Attention-based Model (GCBiA), which applies bi-attention mechanism and
convolutions to extract topic words of prompts and key-phrases of responses,
and introduces gated unit and residual connections between major layers to
better represent the relevance of responses and prompts. Moreover, a new
negative sampling method is proposed to augment training data. Experiment
results demonstrate that our novel approach can achieve significant
improvements in detecting off-topic responses with extremely high on-topic
recall, for both seen and unseen prompts.
