Automatic Amharic Essay Scoring System Using Latent Semantic Analysis

Teklemariam, Abel (2010) Automatic Amharic Essay Scoring System Using Latent Semantic Analysis. Masters thesis, Addis Ababa University.

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Abstract

Essay assessment is considered to play a central role in educational process as essays are the most useful tool to assess learning outcomes. Consequently, essays have been incorporated into many of the standard testing programs like SAT (Systematic Aptitude Test), GRE (Graduate Record Examination), TOFEL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and GMAT (General Management Aptitude Test). Though the importance of essay assessment is elevated, the process of assessment using human evaluators is extremely labor intensive and time consuming. Hence, automatic essay scoring systems are developed to overcome time, cost, and generalizability issues in manual essay assessment. Currently, a number of automatic essay scoring systems using different techniques are available commercially or as a result of research in the field. PEG (Project Essay Grader), E-rater (Electronic Essay rater) and IEA (Intelligent Essay Assessor) are among the most common commercially available automatic essay scoring systems for English language but efforts are also made for other languages as well JESS (Japan Essay Scoring System) and AEA (Automatic Essay Assessor for Finnish) to mention some. This study is an attempt to develop similar system for Amharic language, the working language of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, to factual types of essays. The study used Latent Semantic Analysis which is an information retrieval technique to develop the model. LSA is a novel application used to evaluate essay based on the extent to which an essay can be matched against other essays scored by human raters. To achieve this large number of pre-graded essay corpus in three domains are prepared from different educational institutions and used for developing the model and conducting the experiment. The research conducted a detail set of experiments to measure the performance of the proposed system using the percentage of adjacent agreements between the system score and human score. The result of the experiment varies with the domains involved and found to be 62%, 59% and 52% agreement in three domains which is considered very promising being the first attempt and paves a way for other researchers to participate in automatic essay scoring system.

Item Type: Thesis (Masters)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Essay Assessment, Automatic Amharic Essay Scoring, Latent Semantic Analysis
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Divisions: Africana
Depositing User: Selom Ghislain
Date Deposited: 25 Jun 2018 12:14
Last Modified: 25 Jun 2018 12:16
URI: http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/id/eprint/4274

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