Academic writing ability is an important goal that learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) try to attain. While ESL students’ academic writings have been widely explored, owing to few studies investigating appraisal resources in EFL students’ argumentative writing, the gap still exists about EFL students’ academic writing. This study aimed to see ho...

academic writing ability is an important goal that learners of english as a second language (esl) or english as a foreign language (efl) try to attain. while esl students’ academic writings have been widely explored, owing to few studies investigating appraisal resources in efl students’ argumentative writing, the gap still exists about efl students’ academic writing. this study aimed to see ho...

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...

This paper presents observations that were made about a corpus of 135 graded student essays by analysing them with a computer program that we are designing to provide automated formative feedback on draft essays. In order to provide individualised feedback to help students to improve their essays, the program carries out automatic essay structure recognition and uses domain-independent graphbas...

This paper presents observations that were made about a corpus of 135 graded student essays by analysing them with a computer program that we are designing to provide automated formative feedback on draft essays. In order to provide individualised feedback to help students to improve their essays, the program carries out automatic essay structure recognition and uses domain-independent graphbas...

Most of the current automated essay scoring (AES) systems are trained using manually graded essays from a specific prompt. These systems experience a drop in accuracy when used to grade an essay from a different prompt. Obtaining a large number of manually graded essays each time a new prompt is introduced is costly and not viable. We propose domain adaptation as a solution to adapt an AES syst...

Evaluation of the content of free texts is a challenging task for humans. Automation of this process is largely useful in order to reduce human related errors. We consider one instance of the “free texts” assessment problems; automatic essay grading where the task is to grade student written essays automatically given course materials and a set of human-graded essays as training data. We use a ...

The grades that students receive in school have been used to determine important social outcomes like educational tracks, scholarships, and even wages. However, grades do not always accurately reflect student achievement. Studies show, for example, that teachers discriminate in grading based on students’ ascribed characteristics (such as race or caste). The literature is largely silent, however...

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which highand lowproficiency essays can be predicted by linguistic indices of cohesion (i.e., coreference an...

With the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), it is possible to automatically grade essays, i.e., free-text responses to examinations, by comparing them to a corpus of available learning materials. In order to get grades that correspond to those given by human assessors, it is crucial to train the system with essays that have already been graded. Noise reduction refers to a process in which individu...