Automated Chinese Essay Scoring from Topic Perspective Using Regularized Latent Semantic Indexing

Finding out an effective way to score Chinese written essays automatically remains challenging for researchers. Several methods have been proposed and developed but limited in the character and word usage levels. As one of the scoring standards, however, content or topic perspective is also an important and necessary indicator to assess an essay. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel perspective -- topic, and a new method integrating topic modeling strategy called Regularized Latent Semantic Indexing to recognize the latent topics and Support Vector Machines to train the scoring model. Experimental results show that automated Chinese essay scoring from topic perspective is effective which can improve the rating agreement to 89%.