Essay Assessment With Latent Semantic Analysis

Tristan Miller
May 2001

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for
comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents.  In this paper, I
examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring.  I compare LSA
methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and
critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems built on LSA,
including the Intelligent Essay Assessor, Summary Street, State the
Essence, APex, and Select-a-Kibitzer. Finally, I discuss current avenues
of research, including LSA's application to computer-measured readability
assessment and to automatic summarization of student essays.