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<Paper uid="W96-0304">
  <Title>Using Lexical Semantic Techniques to Classify Free-Responses</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="20" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper discusses a case study in which lexical semantic techniques were used to implement a prototype scoring system for short-answer, free-responses to test questions. Scoring, as it is discussed in this paper, is a kind of clasgification problem. Responses are automatically scored by being assigned appropriate classifications. The ultimate goal is to develop a scoring system which can reliably analyze response content.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For this study, a domain-specific, concept-based lexicon, and a concept grammar were built to represent the response set, using 200 of 378 responses from the original data set. The lexicon is built, from individual words, and 2-word and 3-word terms from the training data. The lexicon is best characterized by Bergler's (1995) layered lexicon. Concept grammar rules are built by mapping concepts from the lexicon onto the concept-structure patterns present in a set of training responses. Previous attempts to score these responses using lexically-based statistical techniques and structure-independent content grammars were not reliable (Burstein and Kaplan (1995)). The results discussed in this paper illustrate the reliability of the lexical semantic methods used in the study.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>