A rigorous psychometric approach is crucial for the accurate measurement of mind-reading abilities. Traditional scoring methods for such tests, which involve lengthy free-text responses, require considerable time and human effort. This study investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) to automate the scoring of psychometric tests. Data were collected from participants aged 13 to 30 years and scored by trained human coders to establish a benchmark. We evaluated multiple LLMs against human assessments, exploring various prompting strate- gies to optimize performance and fine-tuning the models using a subset of the collected data to enhance accuracy. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can assess advanced mind-reading abilities with over 90% accuracy on average. Notably, in most test items, the LLMs achieved higher Kappa agreement with the lead coder than two trained human coders, highlighting their potential to reliably score open-response psychometric tests.

In this paper we implement and compare 7 different data augmentation strategies for the task of automatic scoring of children’s ability to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and desires (or “mindreading”). We recruit in-domain experts to re-annotate augmented samples and determine to what extent each strategy preserves the original rating. We also carry out multiple experiments to measure how much each augmentation strategy improves the performance of automatic scoring systems. To determine the capabilities of automatic systems to generalize to unseen data, we create UK-MIND-20 - a new corpus of children’s performance on tests of mindreading, consisting of 10,320 question-answer pairs. We obtain a new state-of-the-art performance on the MIND-CA corpus, improving macro-F1-score by 6 points. Results indicate that both the number of training examples and the quality of the augmentation strategies affect the performance of the systems. The task-specific augmentations generally outperform task-agnostic augmentations. Automatic augmentations based on vectors (GloVe, FastText) perform the worst. We find that systems trained on MIND-CA generalize well to UK-MIND-20. We demonstrate that data augmentation strategies also improve the performance on unseen data.

In this paper we present the first work on the automated scoring of mindreading ability in middle childhood and early adolescence. We create MIND-CA, a new corpus of 11,311 question-answer pairs in English from 1,066 children aged from 7 to 14. We perform machine learning experiments and carry out extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We obtain promising results, demonstrating the applicability of state-of-the-art NLP solutions to a new domain and task.