Analysing Semantic Flow in Academic Writing

نویسندگان

  • Stephen T. O'Rourke
  • Rafael A. Calvo
چکیده

Many approaches have been proposed for providing feedback in academic writing, however, few of them are visually based. We describe a novel visualisation method for providing feedback to support formative essay assessment. The visualisation method makes use of text mining techniques to provide insight on the semantics of the topics in an essay. We propose that visualisation can be used to mitigate many of the problems associated with the subjectivity of formative essay assessment. The visualisation method involves a process of non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF), to uncover topics in an essay, followed by multidimensional scaling, to map the essay topics to a 2-dimensional representation. We evaluate our approach with a subset of the British Academic Written English corpus of 2761 assignments written by university students.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Sharing of Community Practice through Semantics: A Case Study in Academic Writing

This paper presents a process-driven design of a semantic wiki environment for academic writing, based on the pedagogy of social scaffolding. We illustrate how semantics can be exploited to facilitate effective sharing of practice during the main stages of dissertation writing. We also show initial exploration of semantics for community scaffolding. The research is being conducted within an int...

متن کامل

台灣學生英文寫作冠詞錯誤分析 (English article errors in Taiwanese college students' EFL writing)

The English articles, the, indefinite a/an, and zero can be troublesome for English language learners. Thomas [1] demonstrated that English second language (L2) learners from first languages (L1) that do not have the equivalent of an article system encounter problems using articles. Ionin and Wexler [2] found that such learners fluctuate between definiteness and specificity. This study examined...

متن کامل

An Exploration of Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing

The view that academic writing is purely objective, impersonal and informational, which is often reflected in English for Academic Purposes materials, has been criticized by a number of researchers. By now, the view of academic writing as embodying interaction among writers, readers and the academic community as a whole has been established. Following this assumption, the present study focused ...

متن کامل

Hedges and Boosters in Academic Writing: Native vs. Non-Native Research Articles in Applied Linguistics and Engineering

The expression of doubt and certainty is crucial in academic writing where the authors have to distinguish opinion from fact and evaluate their assertions in acceptable and persuasive ways. Hedges and boosters are two strategies used for this purpose. Despite their importance in academic writing, we know little about how they are used in different disciplines and genres and how foreign language...

متن کامل

Use of Semantics to Build an Academic Writing Community Environment

Writing a dissertation is a critical aspect of the learning experience for most university students in all disciplines. It is often accompanied by anxiety and uncertainty, which supervisors often struggle to understand and address. A community-driven approach to support dissertation writing based on semantic social scaffolding is presented here. The paper describes how a semantic wiki was tailo...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009