Evaluating Argumentative and Narrative Essays using Graphs

Swapna Somasundaran, Brian Riordan, Binod Gyawali, Su-Youn Yoon


Abstract
This work investigates whether the development of ideas in writing can be captured by graph properties derived from the text. Focusing on student essays, we represent the essay as a graph, and encode a variety of graph properties including PageRank as features for modeling essay scores related to quality of development. We demonstrate that our approach improves on a state-of-the-art system on the task of holistic scoring of persuasive essays and on the task of scoring narrative essays along the development dimension.
Anthology ID:
C16-1148
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
1568–1578
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1148
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Swapna Somasundaran, Brian Riordan, Binod Gyawali, and Su-Youn Yoon. 2016. Evaluating Argumentative and Narrative Essays using Graphs. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 1568–1578, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Argumentative and Narrative Essays using Graphs (Somasundaran et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/C16-1148.pdf