Latent Semantic Analysis Parameters for Essay Evaluation using Small-Scale Corpora*

Abstract Some previous studies (e.g. that carried out by Van Bruggen et al. in 2004) have pointed to a need for additional research in order to firmly establish the usefulness of LSA (latent semantic analysis) parameters for automatic evaluation of academic essays. The extreme variability in approaches to this technique makes it difficult to identify the most efficient parameters and the optimum combination. With this goal in mind, we conducted a high spectrum study to investigate the efficiency of some of the major LSA parameters in small-scale corpora. We used two specific domain corpora that differed in the structure of the text (one containing only technical terms and the other with more tangential information). Using these corpora we tested different semantic spaces, formed by applying different parameters and different methods of comparing the texts. Parameters varied included weighting functions (Log-IDF or Log-Entropy), dimensionality reduction (truncating the matrices after SVD to a set percentage of dimensions), methods of forming pseudo-documents (vector sum and folding-in) and measures of similarity (cosine or Euclidean distances). We also included two groups of essays to be graded, one written by experts and other by non-experts. Both groups were evaluated by three human graders and also by LSA. We extracted the correlations of each LSA condition with human graders, and conducted an ANOVA to analyse which parameter combination correlates best. Results suggest that distances are more efficient in academic essay evaluation than cosines. We found no clear evidence that the classical LSA protocol works systematically better than some simpler version (the classical protocol achieves the best performance only for some combinations of parameters in a few cases), and found that the benefits of reducing dimensionality arise only when the essays are introduced into semantic spaces using the folding-in method.