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Text-to-text semantic similarity for automatic short answer grading

Published 1 January 2009Open access
Michael Mohler, Rada Mihalcea
Citations293
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TL;DR

This paper compares a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluates the effect of domain and size on the corpus- based measures, and introduces a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating automatic feedback from the student answers.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore unsupervised techniques for the task of automatic short answer grading. We compare a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluate the effect of domain and size on the corpus-based measures, and also introduce a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating automatic feedback from the student answers. Overall, our system significantly and consistently outperforms other unsupervised methods for short answer grading that have been proposed in the past.

Keywords

Computer Science