Paragraph Specific N-Gram Approaches to Automatically Assessing Essay Quality

In this paper, we describe an n-gram approach to automatically assess essay quality in student writing. Underlying this approach is the development of n-gram indices that examine rhetorical, syntactic, grammatical, and cohesion features of paragraph types (introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs) and entire essays. For this study, we developed over 300 n-gram indices and assessed their potential to predict human ratings of essay quality. A combination of these n-gram indices explained over 30 % of the variance in human ratings for essays in a training and testing corpus. The findings from this study indicate the strength of using n-gram indices to automatically assess writing quality. Such indices not only explain text-based factors that influence human judgments of essay quality, but also provide new methods for automatically assessing writing quality