End-to-end argument mining has enabled the development of new automated essay scoring (AES) systems that use argumentative features (e.g., number of claims, number of support relations) in addition to traditional legacy features (e.g., grammar, discourse structure) when scoring persuasive essays. While prior research has proposed different argumentative features as well as empirically demonstra...

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...

The present thesis deals with asymptotic analysis of financial time series models with conditional heteroscedasticity. It is well-established within financial econometrics that most financial time series data exhibit time varying conditional volatility, as well as other types of non-linearities. Reflecting this, all four essays of this thesis consider models allowing for time varying conditiona...