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Benefits of Modularity in an Automated Essay Scoring System.

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Bibliographic Details
Title: Benefits of Modularity in an Automated Essay Scoring System.
Language: English
Authors: Burstein, Jill, Marcu, Daniel
Peer Reviewed: N
Page Count: 7
Publication Date: 2000
Document Type: Reports - Descriptive
Descriptors: Essays, Scoring, Student Evaluation, Test Scoring Machines
Abstract: "E-rater" is an operational automated essay scoring application that combines several natural language processing (NLP) tools for the purpose of identifying linguistic features in essay responses to assess the quality of the text. The application currently identifies a variety of syntactic, discourse, and topical analysis features. Two clear visions have guided e-rater's development. First, new linguistically based features were to be added to strengthen connections between human scoring guide criteria and e-rater scores. Secondly, e-rater was to be adapted to provide explanatory feedback about writing quality automatically. This paper provides two examples of the flexibility of e-rater's modular architecture for continued application development toward these goals. The paper discusses how additional features from rhetorical parse trees were integrated into e-rater and how the salience of automatically generated discourse-based essay summaries was evaluated for use as instructional feedback through the reuse of e-rater's topical analysis module. (Contains 10 references.) (Author/SLD)
Entry Date: 2001
Accession Number: ED447168
Database: ERIC
Description
Abstract:"E-rater" is an operational automated essay scoring application that combines several natural language processing (NLP) tools for the purpose of identifying linguistic features in essay responses to assess the quality of the text. The application currently identifies a variety of syntactic, discourse, and topical analysis features. Two clear visions have guided e-rater's development. First, new linguistically based features were to be added to strengthen connections between human scoring guide criteria and e-rater scores. Secondly, e-rater was to be adapted to provide explanatory feedback about writing quality automatically. This paper provides two examples of the flexibility of e-rater's modular architecture for continued application development toward these goals. The paper discusses how additional features from rhetorical parse trees were integrated into e-rater and how the salience of automatically generated discourse-based essay summaries was evaluated for use as instructional feedback through the reuse of e-rater's topical analysis module. (Contains 10 references.) (Author/SLD)