ABSTRACT
The Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA) is a set of software tools for scoring the quality of the conceptual content of essays based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Student essays are cast as LSA representations of the meaning of their contained words and compared with essays of known quality on degree of conceptual relevance and amount of relevant content. An advantage of using LSA is that it permits scoring of content-based essays as well as creative narratives. This makes the analyses performed by the IEA suitable for providing directed content-based feedback to students or instructors. In addition, because the content is derived from training material, directed feedback can be linked to the training material. In addition to using LSA, the IEA incorporates a number of other natural language processing methods to provide an overall approach to scoring essays and providing feedback.
