Intelligent short text assessment in eMax

Rapidly increasing student numbers and spreading distance learning systems strengthen the urgent need for effective knowledge assessment systems (KAS\´s). Recent KAS\´s have however, the deficiency of not providing intelligent assessment modules for eg the evaluation of freely formulated short answers including a few sentences or partially solved mathematical problems. The eMax KAS, developed at the Intelligent Knowledge Management Innovation Center of IBM Hungary and the John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics at Budapest Tech, aims to provide these capabilities. Our paper gives an introduction to the intelligent assessment of short texts component of eMax by presenting the approach used for the formal description of the "answer space" defined as well as the methods chosen for the syntactic analysis, semantic analysis and scoring. The a version of eMax is now completed and is in testing.