Method and System for Determining Text Coherence
- Author(s):
- Burstein, Jill; Higgins, Derrick; Gentile, Claudia A.; Marcu, Daniel
- Patent Issued:
- May 22, 2012
- Patent Number:
- 8,185,378
- Source:
- ETS Patent
- Document Type:
- Patent
- Family ID:
- 34572781
- Subject/Key Words:
- Patent, Active Patent, Automated Response Evaluation, Automated Scoring and Natural Language Processing, Discourse Annotation, Text Coherence, Automated Essay Scoring (AES)
Abstract
A method and system for determining text coherence in an essay is disclosed. A method of evaluating the coherence of an essay includes receiving an essay having one or more discourse elements and text segments. The one or more discourse elements are annotated either manually or automatically. A text segment vector is generated for each text segment in a discourse element using sparse random indexing vectors. The method or system then identifies one or more essay dimensions and measures the semantic similarity of each text segment based on the essay dimensions. Finally, a coherence level is assigned to the essay based on the measured semantic similarities.