Go to DBLP homepage"Why My Essay Received a 4?": A Natural Language Processing Based Argumentative Essay Structure Analysis
Abstract: Writing argumentative essays is a critical component of students’ learning. Previous works on automatic assessments on essay writing often focused on providing a holistic score for the input essay, which only summarized the essay’s overall quality. However, to provide more pedagogical value and equitable educational opportunities for all students, an automatized system needs to provide detailed feedback on students’ essays. To address this issue, we developed an essay argumentative structure feedback system to support educators and students. We employed natural language processing (NLP) and data mining techniques to explore the association between argumentative structure and essay scores. First, we proposed a cross-prompt, sentence-level ensemble model to classify the argumentative elements and extract the argumentative structures from the essay. The model worked across multiple datasets and achieved high performance. Second, after applying the classification model on the ACT writing tests, we performed a sequential mining process to extract representative argumentative structures. Our findings highlight the role of organizational argumentative structure in essay scoring. Furthermore, we found a common argumentative structure used by the high-scored essays. Finally, with the knowledge of argumentative elements and structures used in the previous essays, we proposed a feedback tool design to complement the current AES systems and help students improve their argument writing skill.
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