Using Entity-Based Features to Model Coherence in Student Essays

Jill Burstein, Joel R. Tetreault, Slava Andreyev

Abstract: We show how the Barzilay and Lapata entity-based coherence algorithm (2008) can be applied to a new, noisy data domain --- student essays. We demonstrate that by combining Barzilay and Lapata's entity-based features with novel features related to grammar errors and word usage, one can greatly improve the performance of automated coherence prediction for student essays for different populations.