Evaluating Multiple Aspects of Coherence in Student Essays

CriterionSM Online Essay Evaluation Service includes a capability that labels sentences in student writing with essay-based discourse elements (e.g., thesis statements). We describe a new system that enhances Criterion's capability, by evaluating multiple aspects of coherence in essays. This system identifies features of sentences based on semantic similarity measures and discourse structure. A support vector machine uses these features to capture breakdowns in coherence due to relatedness to the essay question and relatedness between discourse elements. Intra-sentential quality is evaluated with rule-based heuristics. Results indicate that the system yields higher performance than a baseline on all three aspects. 1 Overview This work is motivated by a need for advanced discourse analysis capabilities for writing instruction applications. CriterionSM Online Essay Evaluation Service is an application for writing instruction which includes a capability to annotate sentences in stud...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Derrick Higgins, Jill Burstein, Daniel Marcu, Claudia Gentile
• Keywords: Discourse, Discourse Elements, NAACL 2004, NAACL 2007, Online Essay Evaluation