Use of syntactic similarity based similarity matrix for evaluating descriptive answer

Abstract

Reforms in the educational system emphasize more on continuous assessment. The descriptive examination question paper when compared to objective question paper acts as a better aid in continuous assessment for testing the progress of a student under various cognitive levels at different stages of learning. Unfortunately, assessment of descriptive answers is found to be tedious and time consuming by instructors due to the increase in number of examinations in continuous assessment system. In this paper, an attempt has been made to address the problem of automatic evaluation of descriptive answer using vector based similarity matrix with order based word-to-word syntactic similarity measure. Word order similarity measure remains as one of the best measure to find the similarity between sequential words in sentences and is increasing its popularity due to its simple interpretation and easy computation. To the best of our knowledge no work has been carried out for automatic evaluation of descriptive answer using word order vectors. The experimental results prove that this approach is promising for application in automatic evaluation of descriptive answer paper.