Writing has been increasingly regarded by the testers of language tests as an important indicator to assess the language skill of testees. As such tests become more and more popular and the number of testees becomes larger, it is a huge task to score so many essays by raters. So far, many methods have been used to solve this problem and the traditional method is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). ...

The purpose of the current study was to analyze the relationship between automated essay scoring (AES) and human scoring in order to determine the validity and usefulness of AES for large-scale placement tests. Specifically, a correlational research design was used to examine the correlations between AES performance and human raters’ performance. Spearman rank correlation coefficient tests were...

The e-rater system 1 , an automated essay scoring system, developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS), is currently being used to score essay responses on the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). The average agreement between human readers, and between independent human readers and e-rater is approximately 92%. There is much interest in the larger writing community in examining the sy...

Neural approaches to automated essay scoring have recently shown state-of-theart performance. The automated essay scoring task typically involves a broad notion of writing quality that encompasses content, grammar, organization, and conventions. This differs from the short answer content scoring task, which focuses on content accuracy. The inputs to neural essay scoring models – ngrams and embe...

We present the first system developed for automated grading of high school essays written in Swedish. The system uses standard text quality indicators and is able to compare vocabulary and grammar to large reference corpora of blog posts and newspaper articles. The system is evaluated on a corpus of 1 702 essays, each graded independently by the student’s own teacher and also in a blind re-grad...

Research on automated essay scoring (AES) indicates that computer-generated essay ratings are comparable to human ratings. However, despite investigations into the accuracy and reliability of AES scores, less attention has been paid to the feedback delivered to the students. This paper presents a method developers can use to quickly evaluate the usability of an automated feedback system prior t...

Chinese automated essay scoring (CAES) is a very important tool for many educational researches. However, none of the methods for retrieving features in English essays is applicable to Chinese writings because Chinese grammar parsers cannot produce reliable and useful syntactic features. CAES systems must explore other distinct features in Chinese writing. This paper proposes a method for retri...

In this paper we are concerned with the location of topics in text processing and the determination of the update unit in looking up topic continuations and topic shifts. Using key elements of the Centering Model of local discourse coherence and empirical evidence from Modern Greek and Japanese we argue that the appropriate update unit for topic tracking is the sentence in its traditional sense...

The e-rater system 1 is an operational automated essay scoring system, developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS). The average agreement between human readers, and between independent human readers and e-rater is approximately 92%. There is much interest in the larger writing community in examining the system’s performance on nonnative speaker essays. This paper focuses on results of a stud...

It is often the case that new technologies revolutionize areas of intellectual endeavor. They can lead to new analytic rigor, challenge old habits of thought, and raise new theoretical questions. Historically, the most significant technological invention for the study of language was probably alphabetic transcription systems. However, the invention of portable sound-recorders also facilitated i...