Automating the task of scoring short handwritten student essays is considered. The goal is to assign scores which are comparable to those of human scorers by coupling two AI technologies: optical handwriting recognition and automated essay scoring. The test-bed is that of essays written by children in reading comprehension tests. The process involves several image-level operations: removal of p...

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the automated essay scoring system e-rater V.2. Norms were ...

technology application: the Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: (1) Critique Writing Analysis Tools, a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, that identify discourse elements in the essay, and that recognize potentially undesir...

Our work addresses the problem of predicting whether an essay is off-topic to a given prompt or question without any previouslyseen essays as training data. Prior work has used similarity between essay vocabulary and prompt words to estimate the degree of ontopic content. In our corpus of opinion essays, prompts are very short, and using similarity with such prompts to detect off-topic essays y...

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. From mass incarceration to targeted policing: Introduction to the Special Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Richard Rosenfeld EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Overview of “Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced?” . . . . . . 9 Steven N. Durlauf, Daniel S. Nagin RESEARCH ARTICLE. Impr...