Bridging gaps in computerised assessment of texts

A survey of major systems for the automated assessment of free-text answers is presented. This includes the Project Essay Grade (PEG), the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), which employs latent semantic analysis (LSA), and the Electronic Essay Rater (E-Rater). All these systems have the same weakness in that they are unable to perform any assessment of text content. The word order is also not taken into account. In an effort to bridge the gaps in knowledge about this research problem, an introduction to a novel automated text marker (ATM) prototype is given in this paper.