Modeling Thesis Clarity in Student Essays

Isaac Persing and Vincent Ng.
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 260-269, 2013.

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Abstract

Recently, researchers have begun exploring methods of scoring student essays with respect to particular dimensions of quality such as coherence, technical errors, and relevance to prompt, but there is relatively little work on modeling thesis clarity. We present a new annotated corpus and propose a learning-based approach to scoring essays along the thesis clarity dimension. Additionally, in order to provide more valuable feedback on why an essay is scored as it is, we propose a second learning-based approach to identifying what kinds of errors an essay has that may lower its thesis clarity score.

Dataset

The human annotation used in this paper is available from this page.

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Persing+Ng:13a,
  author = {Isaac Persing and Vincent Ng},
  title = {Modeling Thesis Clarity in Student Essays},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  pages = {260--269}, 
  year = 2013}