This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, FLAIRS 2005In previous work we have proved that the BLEU algorithm
(Papineni et al. 2001), originally devised for evaluating
Machine Translation systems, can be applied to
assessing short essays written by students. In this paper
we present a comparative evaluation between this
BLEU-inspired algorithm and a system based on Latent
Semantic Analysis. In addition we propose an effective
combination schema for them. Despite the simplicity of
these shallow NLP methods, they achieve state-of-theart
correlations to the teachers’ scores while keeping the
language-independence and without requiring any domain
specific knowledge.This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Technology, project number TIN2004-03140
