i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

After Bob's LSA lecture last year, I sent an alarmed e-mail to my mom, who's occasionally worked as a grader for the SAT and other standardized tests. I blogged parts of her thoughts about computer, and I'm copying the best of it below:

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Bob mentioned the usage of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to do automated essay scoring. Surprisingly, the scores of the tool (IEA) agreed (a.k.a., were as good and as bad) with human experts "as accurately as expert scores agreed with each other". Had I known this before, I probably had spent more time doing text analysis of "good essays" than writing sample essays for my GRE test!

If you're interested in this stuff, take a look at the paper here: http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/~pfoltz/reprints/Edmedia99.html