Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 12(3): 258!263, 2016
DOI: 10.19026/rjaset.12.2332
ISSN: 2040!7459; e!ISSN: 2040!7467
© 2016 Maxwell Scientific Publication Corp.
Submitted: July 2, 2015 Accepted: August 2, 2015 Published: February 05, 2016
Madhumitha Ramamurthy, Department of CSE, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology,
Coimbatore!641008, TamilNadu, India
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
258
Madhumitha Ramamurthy and Ilango Krishnamurthi
Department of CSE, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore!641008,
TamilNadu, India
Artificial Intelligence has many applications in which automating a human behavior by machines is one
of very important research activities currently in progress. This paper proposes an automated assessment system
which uses two novel similarity measures which evaluate students’ short and long answers and compares it with
cosine similarity measure and n!gram similarity measure. The proposed system evaluates the information recall and
comprehension type answers in Bloom’s taxonomy. The comparison shows that the proposed system which uses
two novel similarity measures outperforms the n!gram similarity measure and cosine similarity measure for
information recall questions and comprehension questions. The system generated scores are also compared with
human scores and the system scores correlates with human scores using Pearson and Spearman’s correlation.
! Artificial intelligence, assessment, education, sentence similarity, similarity, WordNet
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Artificial intelligence creates machines with
intelligence. Many e!learning applications are examples
for machines with intelligence. Automation is also an
important research area where automation of
assessment of students’ answers is an important
research in the educational sector. Computer Assisted
Assessment (CAA) helps to automate the assessment of
answers by using computers.
Students’ answers can be divided into objective
and subjective answers where objective answer
assessment is the most common one when compared to
subjective answers assessment which includes short
answers and long answers. In subjective assessment,
more focus is given on short answers and have many
approaches for assessment when compared to
assessment of long answers.
Evaluation of answers is based on six types of
questions according to bloom’s taxonomy. Those six
categories of questions are information recall,
comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and
evaluation questions.
Information recall questions (Questions Skills,
year) makes the students to recall the studied
information. The students remember the studied
information to answer an information recall question.
Comprehension questions (Questions Skills, year)
make the students to use the studied information and
express the information in their own words.
Application questions (Questions Skills, year)
make the students use the studied information and to
apply what they have learned to solve the problem.
Analysis questions (Questions Skills, year) make
the students to analyze the questions by the studied
information and answer those questions and they also
reason out their findings.
Synthesis questions (Questions Skills, year) make
the students to answer the questions by thinking
innovatively by finding their own ways for solving the
problems.
Evaluation questions (Questions Skills, year) make
the students to answer the questions by evaluating and
judging their idea and coming to a conclusion why an
idea is better than the another idea and they should also
give based on what criteria they have given this
evaluation.
The humans can evaluate all these types of
questions. But there is a challenge for computers to do
this task. The proposed assessment system automates
the evaluation of information recall type questions and
comprehension questions.
&"## ’"(
PEG (Project Essay Grade), (Whittington and
Hunt, 1999). This was one of the earliest
implementations for automatic assessment. It did not
consider NLP and lexical content to grade the essays
and focused on only simple style analysis. The strength