ZaQQ: A New Arabic Dataset for Automatic Essay Scoring via a Novel Human–AI Collaborative Framework

Automated essay scoring (AES) has become an essential tool in educational assessment. However, applying AES to the Arabic language presents notable challenges, primarily due to the lack of labeled datasets. This data scarcity hampers the development of reliable machine learning models and slows progress in Arabic natural language processing for educational use. While manual annotation by human experts remains the most accurate method for essay evaluation, it is often too costly and time-consuming to create large-scale datasets, especially for low-resource languages like Arabic. In this work, we introduce a human–AI collaborative framework designed to overcome the shortage of scored Arabic essays. Leveraging QAES, a high-quality annotated dataset, our approach uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate multidimensional essay evaluations across seven key writing traits: Relevance, Organization, Vocabulary, Style, Development, Mechanics, and Structure. To ensure accuracy and consistency, we design prompting strategies and validation procedures tailored to each trait. This system is then applied to two unannotated Arabic essay datasets: ZAEBUC and QALB. As a result, we introduce ZaQQ, a newly annotated dataset that merges ZAEBUC, QAES, and QALB. Our findings demonstrate that human–AI collaboration can significantly enhance the availability of labeled resources without compromising assessment quality. The proposed framework serves as a scalable and replicable model for addressing data annotation challenges in low-resource languages and supports the broader goal of expanding access to automated educational assessment tools where expert evaluation is limited.