  Automatic essay grading (AEG) is a process in which machines assign a grade
to an essay written in response to a topic, called the prompt. Zero-shot AEG is
when we train a system to grade essays written to a new prompt which was not
present in our training data. In this paper, we describe a solution to the
problem of zero-shot automatic essay grading, using cognitive information, in
the form of gaze behaviour. Our experiments show that using gaze behaviour
helps in improving the performance of AEG systems, especially when we provide a
new essay written in response to a new prompt for scoring, by an average of
almost 5 percentage points of QWK.
