Automatic coding of short text responses via clustering in educational assessment

Automatic coding of short text responses opens new doors in assessment. We implemented and integrated baseline methods of natural language processing and statistical modelling by means of software components that are available under open licenses. The accuracy of automatic text coding is demonstrated by using data collected in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 in Germany. Free text responses of 10 items with Formula responses in total were analyzed. We further examined the effect of different methods, parameter values, and sample sizes on performance of the implemented system. The system reached fair to good up to excellent agreement with human codings Formula Especially items that are solved by naming specific semantic concepts appeared properly coded. The system performed equally well with Formula and somewhat poorer but still acceptable down to Formula Based on our findings, we discuss potential innovations for assessment that are enabled by automatic coding of short text responses. (DIPF/Orig.

Sobre los efectos de combinar Análisis Semántico Latente con otras técnicas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural para la evaluación de preguntas abiertas

Este artículo presenta la combinación de Análisis Semántico Latente (LSA) con otras técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural (lematización, eliminación de palabras funcionales y desambiguación de sentidos) para mejorar la evaluación automática de respuestas en texto libre. El sistema de evaluación de respuestas en texto libre llamado Atenea (Alfonseca & Pérez, 2004) ha servido de marco experimental para probar el esquema combinacional. Atenea es un sistema capaz de realizar preguntas, escogidas aleatoriamente o bien conforme al perfil del estudiante, y asignarles una calificación numérica. Los resultados de los experimentos demuestran que para todos los conjuntos de datos en los que las técnicas de PLN se han combinado con LSA la correlación de Pearson entre las notas dadas por Atenea y las notas dadas por los profesores para el mismo conjunto de preguntas mejora. La causa puede encontrarse en la complementariedad entre LSA, que trabaja a un nivel semántico superficial, y el resto de las técnicas NLP usadas en Atenea, que están más centradas en los niveles léxico y sintáctico.This article presents the combination of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) with other natural language processing techniques (stemming, removal of closed-class words and word sense disambiguation) to improve the automatic assessment of students' free-text answers. The combinational schema has been tested in the experimental framework provided by the free-text Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) system called Atenea (Alfonseca & Pérez, 2004). This system is able to ask randomly or according to the students' profile an open-ended question to the student and then, assign a score to it. The results prove that for all datasets, when the NLP techniques are combined with LSA, the Pearson correlation between the scores given by Atenea and the scores given by the teachers for the same dataset of questions improves. We believe that this is due to the complementarity between LSA, which works more at a shallow semantic level, and the rest of the NLP techniques used in Atenea, which are more focused on the lexical and syntactical levels

Framing automatic grading techniques for open-ended questionnaires responses. A short survey

The assessment of students' performances is one of the essential components of teaching activities, and it poses different challenges to teachers and instructors, especially when considering the grading of responses to open-ended questions (i.e., short-answers or essays). Open-ended tasks allow a more in-depth assessment of students' learning levels, but their evaluation and grading are time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. For these reasons, automatic grading techniques have been studied for a long time, focusing mainly on short-answers rather than long essays. Given the growing popularity of Massive Online Open Courses and the shifting from physical to virtual classrooms environments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of questionnaires for evaluating learning performances has rapidly increased. Hence, it is of particular interest to analyze the recent effort of researchers in the development of techniques designed to grade students' responses to open-ended questions. In our work, we consider a systematic literature review focusing on automatic grading of open-ended written assignments. The study encompasses 488 articles published from 1984 to 2021 and aims at understanding the research trends and the techniques to tackle essay automatic grading. Lastly, inferences and recommendations are given for future works in the Learning Analytics field

Framing automatic grading techniques for open-ended questionnaires responses. A short survey

The assessment of students' performances is one of the essential components of teaching activities, and it poses different challenges to teachers and instructors, especially when considering the grading of responses to open-ended questions (i.e., short-answers or essays). Open-ended tasks allow a more in-depth assessment of students' learning levels, but their evaluation and grading are time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. For these reasons, automatic grading techniques have been studied for a long time, focusing mainly on short-answers rather than long essays. Given the growing popularity of Massive Online Open Courses and the shifting from physical to virtual classrooms environments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of questionnaires for evaluating learning performances has rapidly increased. Hence, it is of particular interest to analyze the recent effort of researchers in the development of techniques designed to grade students' responses to open-ended questions. In our work, we consider a systematic literature review focusing on automatic grading of open-ended written assignments. The study encompasses 488 articles published from 1984 to 2021 and aims at understanding the research trends and the techniques to tackle essay automatic grading. Lastly, inferences and recommendations are given for future works in the Learning Analytics field

A scoring rubric for automatic short answer grading system

During the past decades, researches about automatic grading have become an interesting issue. These studies focuses on how to make machines are able to help human on assessing students’ learning outcomes. Automatic grading enables teachers to assess student's answers with more objective, consistent, and faster. Especially for essay model, it has two different types, i.e. long essay and short answer. Almost of the previous researches merely developed automatic essay grading (AEG) instead of automatic short answer grading (ASAG). This study aims to assess the sentence similarity of short answer to the questions and answers in Indonesian without any language semantic's tool. This research uses pre-processing steps consisting of case folding, tokenization, stemming, and stopword removal. The proposed approach is a scoring rubric obtained by measuring the similarity of sentences using the string-based similarity methods and the keyword matching process. The dataset used in this study consists of 7 questions, 34 alternative reference answers and 224 student’s answers. The experiment results show that the proposed approach is able to achieve a correlation value between 0.65419 up to 0.66383 at Pearson's correlation, with Mean Absolute Error () value about 0.94994 until 1.24295. The proposed approach also leverages the correlation value and decreases the error value in each method

Towards robust computerised marking of free-text responses

This paper describes and exemplifies an application of AutoMark, a software system developed in pursuit of robust computerised marking of free-text answers to open-ended questions. AutoMark employs the techniques of Information Extraction to provide computerised marking of short free-text responses. The system incorporates a number of processing modules specifically aimed at providing robust marking in the face of errors in spelling, typing, syntax, and semantics. AutoMark looks for specific content within free-text answers, the content being specified in the form of a number of mark scheme templates. Each template represents one form of a valid (or a specifically invalid) answer. Student answers are first parsed, and then intelligently matched against each mark scheme template, and a mark for each answer is computed. The representation of the templates is such that they can be robustly mapped to multiple variations in the input text. The current paper describes AutoMark for the first time, and presents the results of a brief quantitative and qualitative study of the performance of the system in marking a range of free-text responses in one of the most demanding domains: statutory national curriculum assessment of science for pupils at age 11. This particular domain has been chosen to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current system in marking responses where errors in spelling, syntax, and semantics are at their most frequent. Four items of varying degrees of open-endedness were selected from the 1999 tests. These items are drawn from the real-world of so-called ‘high stakes’ testing experienced by cohorts of over half a million pupils in England each year since 1995 at ages 11 and 14. A quantitative and qualitative study of the performance of the system is provided, together with a discussion of the potential for further development in reducing these errors. The aim of this exploration is to reveal some of the issues which need to be addressed if computerised marking is to play any kind of reliable role in the future development of such test regimes

TOWARDS BUILDING INTELLIGENT COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING SYSTEMS

Historically, Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) systems were more focused on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) issues, such as providing good experience of communication among the participants. Whereas, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) focus both on HCI issues as well as leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in their intelligent agents. This dissertation seeks to minimize the gap between CPS systems and ITS by adopting the methods used in ITS researches. To move towards this goal, we focus on analyzing interactions with textual inputs in online learning systems such as DeepTutor and Virtual Internships (VI) to understand their semantics and underlying intents. In order to address the problem of assessing the student generated short text, this research explores firstly data driven machine learning models coupled with expert generated as well as general text analysis features. Secondly it explores method to utilize knowledge graph embedding for assessing student answer in ITS. Finally, it also explores a method using only standard reference examples generated by human teacher. Such method is useful when a new system has been deployed and no student data were available.To handle negation in tutorial dialogue, this research explored a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based method. The advantage of this method is that it requires no human engineered features and performs comparably well with other models using human engineered features.Another important analysis done in this research is to find speech acts in conversation utterances of multiple players in VI. Among various models, a noise label trained neural network model performed better in categorizing the speech acts of the utterances.The learners\u27 professional skill development in VI is characterized by the distribution of SKIVE elements, the components of epistemic frames. Inferring the population distribution of these elements could help to assess the learners\u27 skill development. This research sought a Markov method to infer the population distribution of SKIVE elements, namely the stationary distribution of the elements.While studying various aspects of interactions in our targeted learning systems, we motivate our research to replace the human mentor or tutor with intelligent agent. Introducing intelligent agent in place of human helps to reduce the cost as well as scale up the system

Using Ontology-based Information Extraction for Subject-based Auto-grading

The procedure for the grading of students’ essays in subject-based examinations is quite challenging particularly when dealing with large number of students. Hence, several automatic essay-grading systems have been designed to alleviate the demands of manual subject grading. However, relatively few of the existing systems are able to give informative feedbacks that are based on elaborate domain knowledge to students, particularly in subject-based automatic grading where domain knowledge is a major factor. In this work, we discuss the vision of subject-based automatic essay scoring system that leverages on semiautomatic creation of subject ontology, uses ontology-based information extraction approach to enable automatic essay scoring, and gives informative feedback to students