• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.911-920
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• 2014

In this paper, we introduce an automatic scoring system for middle-school level writing test based on using machine learning techniques. We discuss overall process and features for building an automatic English writing scoring system. A "concept answer" which represents an abstract meaning of text is newly introduced in order to evaluate the elaboration of a student's answer. In this work, multiple machine learning algorithms are adopted for scoring English writings. We suggest a decision process "optimal combination" which optimally combines multiple outputs of machine learning algorithms and generates a final single output in order to improve the performance of the automatic scoring. By experiments with actual test data, we evaluate the performance of overall automated English writing scoring system.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.3 s.113
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• pp.223-230
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• 2007

The purpose of developing an automated scoring system for English composition is to score the tests for writing English sentences and to give feedback on them without human's efforts. This paper presents an automated system to score English composition, whose input is a single sentence, not an essay. Dealing with a single sentence as an input has some advantages on comparing the input with the given answers by human teachers and giving detailed feedback to the test takers. The system has been developed and tested with the real test data collected through English tests given to the third grade students in junior high school. Two steps of the process are required to score a single sentence. The first process is analyzing the input sentence in order to detect possible errors, such as spelling errors, syntactic errors and so on. The second process is comparing the input sentence with the given answer to identify the differences as errors. The results produced by the system were then compared with those provided by human raters.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.223-255
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• 2008

In this paper, we introduce an automatic system of scoring English essays. The system is comprised of three main components: a spelling checker, a grammar checker and a lexical cohesion checker. We have used such resources as WordNet, Link Grammar/parser and Roget's thesaurus for these components. The usefulness of an automatic scoring system depends on its reliability. To measure reliability, we compared the results of automatic scoring with those of manual scoring, on the basis of the Kappa statistics and the Multi-facet Rasch Model. The statistical data obtained from the comparison showed that the scoring system is as reliable as professional human graders. This system deals with textual units rather than sentential units and checks not only formal properties of a text but also its contents.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.45-56
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• 2015

In this paper, we present a method that can detect context-sensitive word errors and generate correction candidates. Spelling error detection is one of the most widespread research topics, however, the approach proposed in this paper is adjusted for an automated English scoring system. A common strategy in context-sensitive word error detection is using a pre-defined confusion set to generate correction candidates. We automatically generate a confusion set in order to consider the characteristics of sentences written by second-language learners. We define a word error that cannot be detected by a conventional grammar checker because of part-of-speech ambiguity, and propose how to detect the error and generate correction candidates for this kind of error. An experiment is performed on the English writings composed by junior-high school students whose mother tongue is Korean. The f1 value of the proposed method is 70.48%, which shows that our method is promising comparing to the current-state-of-the art.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.9
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• pp.381-388
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• 2014

In this paper, we deal with implementation issues of an unknown word classifier for middle-school level English writing test. We define the type of unknown words occurred in English text and discuss the detection process for unknown words. Also, we define the type of swear words occurred in students's English writings, and suggest how to handle this type of words. We implement an unknown word classifier with a swear detection module for developing an automatic English writing scoring system. By experiments with actual test data, we evaluate the accuracy of the unknown word classifier as well as the swear detection module.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.16B no.2
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• pp.173-180
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• 2009

The purpose of developing an automated scoring system for English composition is to score English writing tests and to give diagnostic feedback to the test-takers without human's efforts. The system developed through our research detects grammatical errors of a single sentence on morphological, syntactic and semantic stages, respectively, and those errors are calculated into the final score. The error detecting stages are independent from one another, which causes duplicating the identical errors with different labels at different stages. These duplicated errors become a hindering factor to calculating an accurate score. This paper presents a solution to detecting the duplicated errors and improving an accuracy in calculating the final score by eliminating one of the errors.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.9
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• pp.1124-1132
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• 2015

In order to train a supervised machine learning algorithm, it is necessary to have non-biased labels and a sufficient amount of training data. However, it is difficult to collect the required non-biased labels and a sufficient amount of training data to develop an automatic English Composition scoring system. In addition, an English writing assessment is carried out using a multi-faceted evaluation of the overall level of the answer. Therefore, it is difficult to choose an appropriate machine learning algorithm for such work. In this paper, we show that it is possible to alleviate these problems through ensemble learning. The results of the experiment indicate that the ensemble technique exhibited an overall performance that was better than that of other algorithms.