gris@surf.sics.bu.oz (Dave Gris) (04/09/90)
We are looking for software to analyse responses to short answer questions. The kind of set-up I imagine would involve the entry of domain information, the question, the acceptable answer(s) and the students answers. The software would then mark the answers. I am not asking for much am I? :-) Stories of failed attempts would also be appreciated. Please email me direct, I will summarise if appropriate. Thanks in advance Dave Gris gris@surf.sics.bu.oz.au
meadors@cogsci.ucsd.EDU (Tony Meadors) (04/13/90)
In article <938@surf.sics.bu.oz> gris@surf.sics.bu.oz.au (Dave Gris) writes: >We are looking for software to analyse responses to short answer questions. >The kind of set-up I imagine would involve the entry of domain information, >the question, the acceptable answer(s) and the students answers. The >software would then mark the answers. > >I am not asking for much am I? :-) >Dave Gris To say the least, this would be a considerable linguistic/arificial intelligence undertaking (millions of DOD dollars :^). Understanding and mimicking human language skills is still in its infancy: not so much because we don't know alot about the processes, but because they're so darn complex, and our brain's hardware is uniquely and compeletely a parallel processor. Realistically, a program as general as you describe is not feasable yet. Why, everyone shouts? Again, its simply that the complexity of what goes on in language understanding, decision-making is easy to overlook simply because they are such natural actions for us. But, of course, you don't care how "we" grade questions, you just want a program to do the job anyway it can: an AI approach. Any such method I'm afraid will require LOTS of serial syntactic parsing and semantic analysis. In developing such a program: You would soon agree to add all sorts of answer format requirements... You would soon make the program "domain smart"...(work on only 1 subject) You would get a system that, alas, makes mistakes. But maybe not more than the average instructor does anyway :^) tonyM