Implementation and Applications of the Intelligent Essay Assessor

In 1998 Pearson Knowledge Technologies (formerly Knowledge Analysis Technologies) entered the business of automatically scoring text, such as essays. Prior to that, founders Landauer and Foltz had experimented with using automated essay grading in their large psychology lecture courses beginning in 1994. A typical prompt from that era was: “Describe the differences between classical and operant conditioning.” The innovation that Pearson Knowledge Technologies (PKT) brought to bear on scoring text was incorporating an automated, mathematical way of representing and assessing the content of text that corresponded to judgments that people make about the similarity in meaning between passages of text and individual words. This scoring technology is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a machine-learning method that acquires and represents knowledge about the meaning of words and documents by analyzing large bodies of natural text. LSA is all of the following:

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