Supportive Automated Feedback for Short Essay Answers (SAFeSEA)

本研究的目的是提供一个有效的自动交互反馈系统，为大学生在远程或电子学习环境中撰写论文提供可接受的支持。我们的工具将基于一个支持在线写作和论文评估的现有系统OpenComment(Whitelock&Watt，2008)，但这需要解决几个问题，无论是在自然语言处理方面，还是在教育理论和实践方面。因此，这项建议是一个真正的跨学科问题。自然语言处理的问题是如何足够好地理解一篇学生论文，以提供准确的、有针对性的反馈，以及如何自动生成反馈。我们打算使用文档分类(语义相似性度量)、信息提取、文档摘要和文本生成等技术来解决这些问题。我们构建的工具需要足够灵活，以支持不同类型和模型的反馈。教育问题是如何开发和评估有效的反馈模型。这就需要对反馈的内容选择、呈现方式和传递方式进行研究。将调查的反馈的主要方面是：总结；对积极成就的认可；错误或遗漏的位置；与因果关系有关的误解或问题；与论文中讨论的具体问题有关的战术和战略提示；与“元认知”相关的问题(即学习过程的自我意识)，以及对学习过程的自我调节。为了使反馈有效，它不仅应该帮助学生管理他们目前的作文任务，而且还应该导致他们的作文技能、与有效的自我调节相关的技能的进一步发展，以及他们完成课程的动机。获取有效性数据的方法将是学生调查、与选定参与者的访谈、对提交反馈的不同版本的论文的分析，以及期末论文的质量。

The aim of this research is to provide an effective automated interactive feedback system that yields an acceptable level of support for university students writing essays in a distance or e-learning context. Our tool will be based on an existing system supporting the online writing and assessment of essays, OpenComment (Whitelock & Watt, 2008), but this requires several problems to be solved, both in natural language processing, and in educational theory and practice. This proposal is therefore a truly interdisciplinary one.The natural language processing problems are how to `understand' a student essay well enough to provide accurate and individually targeted feedback, and how to generate that feedback automatically. We intend to use techniques from document classification (measures of semantic similarity), information extraction, document summarisation, and text generation to address these problems. The tools we build need to be flexible enough to support different types and models of feedback.The educational problem is how to develop and evaluate effective models of feedback. This requires research into the selection of the content, mode of presentation and delivery of the feedback. The primary aspects of feedback which will be investigated are: summarisation; recognition of positive achievements; location of errors of commission or omission; misconceptions or problems connected with causal relationships; tactical and strategic hints both relating to the specific issues being addressed in the essay and issues connected with `metacognition' (i.e. self awareness of the learning process), and self-regulation of the learning process. For feedback to be effective, it should assist students not only to manage their current essay-writing task, but it should also lead to further development of their essay-writing skills, the skills associated with efficient self-regulation, and their motivation to complete their course. The methods used to obtain data on effectiveness will be student surveys, interviews with selected participants, analysis of the various versions of the essays submitted for feedback, and the quality of the final essay.