Automated essay scoring using set of literary sememes

Automatic essay scoring system is a very important research tool for many educational studies. Many researches indicate that AES systems should be able to analyze semantic characteristics of an essay and include more such features to score essays. This paper makes an assumption: some concepts that can be regarded as literary concepts would only be utilized by skillful writers. However, it is a difficult task to extract literal concepts due to small size of training corpora. This work uses a semantic network tool to overcome the problem. The concepts in essays can be transformed into sememes using the tool and literary concepts are also transformed into literary sememes. This work introduces a method which makes use of the literary sememes in an essay to score the essay. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method for Chinese essays is comparable to those as achieved by several current English AES systems.