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SUMMARY:The automated assessment of texts produced by learners of English 
 - Helen Yannakoudakis (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20110303T120000Z
DTEND:20110303T130000Z
UID:TALK30151@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jimme Jardine
DESCRIPTION:Helen writes:\n\nWe are working on the automated assessment of
  texts produced by learners of English (as a second language) in response 
 to prompts eliciting free-text answers. We have built a system that analys
 es and assesses the quality of writing competence automatically. Our syste
 m uses ranking SVMs and assigns a score to a text based on textual feature
 s. The text is between 200 and 400 words.\n\nWe are interested in collecti
 ng real data to test the validity of our system\, and thus would like to i
 nvite you to trick its scoring capabilities. For example\, preliminary exp
 eriments on our current version have shown that discourse incoherent texts
  give rise to large discrepancies between the examiner's scores and the sy
 stem's predicted values. A paper draft describing how our system works as 
 well as sample texts\, prompts and the marking criteria can be found in:\n
 \nhttp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~hy260/AA.html\n\nThere is a prize of 50 pounds 
 to the person that will compose a text that creates the highest disparity 
 between the system's output and the mark awarded by an examiner. Multiple 
 submissions are welcome (in plain text)\, with a slight preference on gett
 ing texts that trick the system into assigning scores higher than deserved
 .\n\nIn this week's reading group I will be giving more details about the 
 competition as well as our automated assessment system. \n\nIf you would l
 ike to participate\, please send me your texts by March 20. If possible\, 
 please also include two (short) sentences\, one describing the topic of yo
 ur text and another the reasons why you think the system will be tricked.\
 n\nMany thanks\,\nHelen \n\n
LOCATION:GS15\, Computer Laboratory
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