Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a prominent mode of online education, but the quality of assessments in MOOCs remains inconsistent. There has been a consistent gap between the state of the art in assessment and the state of the practice in both MOOCs and other forms of educational technology. Improving the quality of assessment has the potential to improve their usefulness f...

Two Bayesian models for text classification from the information science field were extended and applied to student produced essays. Both models were calibrated using 462 essays with two score points. The calibrated systems were applied to 80 new, pre-scored essays with 40 essays in each score group. Manipulated variables included the two models; the use of words, phrases and arguments; two app...

Supervised machine learning models for automated essay scoring (AES) usually require substantial task-specific training data in order to make accurate predictions for a particular writing task. This limitation hinders their utility, and consequently their deployment in real-world settings. In this paper, we overcome this shortcoming using a constrained multi-task pairwisepreference learning app...

Automated methods for identifying whether sentences are grammatical have various potential applications (e.g., machine translation, automated essay scoring, computer-assisted language learning). In this work, we construct a statistical model of grammaticality using various linguistic features (e.g., misspelling counts, parser outputs, n-gram language model scores). We also present a new publicl...

In this paper, we present a text evaluation system for students to improve Basque or Spanish writing skills. The system uses Natural Language Processing techniques to evaluate essays by detecting specific measures. The application uses a client-server architecture and both the interface and the application itself are multilingual. The article also explains how the system can be adapted to evalu...

Automated essay scoring is now an established capability used from elementary school through graduate school for purposes of instruction and assessment. Newer applications provide automated diagnostic feedback about student writing. Feedback includes errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, comments about writing style, and evaluation of discourse structure. This paper reports on a system that ...

This paper describes a deployed educational technology application: the Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: E-rater, an automated essay scoring system and Critique Writing Analysis Tools , a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechani...

Machine translation has clearly entered into the marketplace as a helpful technology. Commercial applications are used on the internet for automatic translation of web pages and news articles. In the business environment, companies offer software that performs automatic translations of web sites for localization purposes, and translations of business documents (e.g., memo and e-mails). With reg...

This paper presents Apex, a system that can automatically assess a student essay based on its content. It relies on Latent Semantic Analysis, a tool which is used to represent the meaning of words as vectors in a high-dimensional space. By comparing an essay and the text of a given course on a semantic basis, our system can measure how well the essay matches the text. Various assessments are pr...

This essay examines greetings as one of the elements of politeness in a Nigerian community and how it influences the cultural characteristics of the people. To analyze, this essay makes use of speech act theory and politeness principle and also considers the pragmatic context in analyzing different types of greetings such as condolences, departure and arrival, rejoicing, daily greetings, casual...