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> From: John Milton <lcjohn@uxmail.ust.hk>
> To: CORPORA@HD.UIB.NO
> Subject: Re: Corpora: generalisation in text
> Date: Thursday, September 10, 1998 1:05 AM
>
> Is this rlevant?
>
> THE INTELLIGENT ESSAY ASSESSOR
> A psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder is
> spearheading the creation of an Intelligent Essay Assessor, a
computerized
> tool to assist professors in grading students' written essays. Thomas
> Landauer says that to use the program, a professor must first teach it to
> recognize both good and bad essay writing by feeding it examples of both,
> which have been manually graded. The program can also be trained using
> what he calls a "gold standard" -- passages from textbooks or other
> materials written by experts on the same subject as the essay to be
> graded. While earlier digital essay graders work by analyzing essays
> mechanically -- looking at sentence structures and counting commas,
> periods and word lengths -- Landauer says his program can actually
> "understand" the student's writing using sophisticated artificial
> intelligence technology called "latent semantic analysis." It does so by
> comparing the patterns of word usage in student essays with the usage
> patterns it has learned from the initial samples, enabling the computer
> "to a good approximation, to understand the meanings of words and
passages
> of text." If an essay appears to convey the same knowledge as those used
> in the examples, the computer gives it a high score. The Intelligent
> Essay Assessor is not meant to be used to grade essays in
> English-composition or creative-writing assignments, where a student is
> being graded more on writing skill than subject knowledge.
> (Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Sep 98)
>
>
> .............................................
> John Milton
> Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
> lcjohn@usthk.ust.hk
>
>
>
>