Summarizing Student Responses to Reflection Prompts

We propose to automatically summarize student responses to reflection prompts and introduce a novel summarization algorithm that differs from traditional methods in several ways. First, since the linguistic units of student inputs range from single words to multiple sentences, our summaries are created from extracted phrases rather than from sentences. Second, the phrase summarization algorithm ranks the phrases by the number of students who semantically mention a phrase in a summary. Experimental results show that the proposed phrase summarization approach achieves significantly better summarization performance on an engineering course corpus in terms of ROUGE scores when compared to other summarization methods, including MEAD, LexRank and MMR.