tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Towards Automatic Classification of Discourse Elements in Essays"

Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance, if the thesis statement of a student’s essay could be automatically identified, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to its quality, and its relationship to other discourse elements in the essay. Using a relatively small corpus of manually annotated data, we use Bayesian classification to identify thesis statements. This method yields results that are much closer to human performance than the results produced by two baseline systems. . | Towards Automatic Classification of Discourse Elements in Essays Jill Burstein ETS Technologies MS 18E Princeton NJ 08541 USA Jburstein@ Daniel Marcu ISI USC 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey CA USA Marcu@ Slava Andreyev Martin Chodorow ETS Technologies Hunter College The MS 18E City University of Princeton NJ 08541 New York USA New York NY USA sandreyev@ . edu Abstract Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance if the thesis statement of a student s essay could be automatically identified the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to its quality and its relationship to other discourse elements in the essay. Using a relatively small corpus of manually annotated data we use Bayesian classification to identify thesis statements. This method yields results that are much closer to human performance than the results produced by two baseline systems. 1 Introduction Automated essay scoring technology can achieve agreement with a single human judge that is comparable to agreement between two single human judges Burstein et al 1998 Foltz et al 1998 Larkey 1998 and Page and Peterson 1995 . Unfortunately providing students with just a score grade is insufficient for instruction. To help students improve their writing skills writing evaluation systems need to provide feedback that is specific to each individual s writing and that is applicable to essay revision. The factors that contribute to improvement of student writing include refined sentence structure variety of appropriate word usage and organizational structure. The improvement of organizational structure is believed to be critical in the essay revision process toward overall improvement of essay quality. Therefore it would be desirable to have a system that could indicate as feedback