Automarking: Automatic assessment of open questions

Laurie Cutrone, Maiga Chang

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPublished Conference contributionpeer-review

    23 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    A number of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) exist on the market today. A subset of a LMS is the component in which student assessment is managed. In some forms of assessment, such as open questions, the LMS is incapable of evaluating the students' responses and therefore human intervention is necessary. In order to assess at higher levels of Bloom's (1956) taxonomy, it is necessary to include open-style questions in which the student is given the task as well as the freedom to arrive at a response without the comfort of recall words and/or phrases. Automating the assessment process of open questions is an area of research that has been ongoing since the 1960s. Earlier work focused on statistical or probabilistic approaches based primarily on conceptual understanding. Recent gains in Natural Language Processing have resulted in a shift in the way in which free text can be evaluated. This has allowed for a more linguistic approach which focuses heavily on factual understanding. This study will leverage the research conducted in recent studies in the area of Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction and Information Retrieval in order to provide a fair, timely and accurate assessment of student responses to open questions based on the semantic meaning of those responses.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings - 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2010
    Pages143-147
    Number of pages5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2010
    Event10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2010 - Sousse, Tunisia
    Duration: 5 Jul. 20107 Jul. 2010

    Publication series

    NameProceedings - 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2010

    Conference

    Conference10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2010
    Country/TerritoryTunisia
    CitySousse
    Period5/07/107/07/10

    Keywords

    • Computerized grading
    • Information retrieval
    • Natural language processing
    • Open question
    • Part of speech tagging
    • Semantic meaning
    • WordNet

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Automarking: Automatic assessment of open questions'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this