The Influence of NER on the Essay Grading

Automatically evaluating essays is still a hard problem to be dealt with intelligent algorithms. The majority of approaches try to find shallow features to infer the grade such as the number of words, verbs, sentence size and so forth. Others strategies seek for more complex structures in written language to tackle this problem. This paper discusses the use of Named Entities as additional features to enhance the quality of the state-of-the art for the Portuguese language in two out of five dimensions of the evaluation criteria. These results show the importance of taking into account the named entities to evaluate the quality of the students’ arguments concerning the essay’s topic addressed.