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<Paper uid="P01-1014">
  <Title>Towards Automatic Classification of Discourse Elements in Essays</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Automated essay scoring technology can achieve agreement with a single human judge that is comparable to agreement between two single human judges (Burstein, et al 1998; Foltz, et al 1998; Larkey, 1998; and Page and Peterson, 1995). Unfortunately, providing students with just a score (grade) is insufficient for instruction. To help students improve their writing skills, writing evaluation systems need to provide feedback that is specific to each individual's writing and that is applicable to essay revision.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The factors that contribute to improvement of student writing include refined sentence structure, variety of appropriate word usage, and organizational structure. The improvement of organizational structure is believed to be critical in the essay revision process toward overall improvement of essay quality. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system that could indicate as feedback to students, the discourse elements in their essays. Such a system could present to students a guided list of questions to consider about the quality of the discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> For instance, it has been suggested by writing experts that if the thesis statement  of a student's essay could be automatically provided, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement and its quality. In addition, such an instructional application could utilize the thesis statement to discuss other types of discourse elements in the essay, such as the relationship between the thesis statement and the conclusion, and the connection between the thesis statement and the main points in the essay. In the teaching of writing, in order to facilitate the revision process, students are often presented with 'Revision Checklists.' A revision checklist is a list of questions posed to the student to help the student reflect on the quality of his or her writing. Such a list might pose questions such as: a) Is the intention of my thesis statement clear?  A thesis statement is generally defined as the sentence that explicitly identifies the purpose of the paper or previews its main ideas. See the Literacy Education On-line (LEO) site at http://leo.stcloudstate.edu.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> (Annotator 1) &amp;quot;In my opinion student should do what they want to do because they feel everything and they can't have anythig they feel because they probably feel to do just because other people do it not they want it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (Annotator 2) I think doing what students want is good for them. I sure they want to achieve in the highest place but most of the student give up. They they don't get what they want. To get what they want, they have to be so strong and take the lesson from their parents Even take a risk, go to the library, and study hard by doing different thing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Some student they do not get what they want because of their family. Their family might be careless about their children so this kind of student who does not get support, loving from their family might not get what he wants. He just going to do what he feels right away. So student need a support from their family they has to learn from them and from their background. I learn from my background I will be the first generation who is going to gradguate from university that is what I  b) Does my thesis statement respond directly to the essay question? c) Are the main points in my essay clearly stated? d) Do the main points in my essay relate to my original thesis statement? If these questions are expressed in general terms, they are of little help; to be useful, they need to be grounded and need to refer explicitly to the essays students write (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1985; White 1994).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The ability to automatically identify and present to students the discourse elements in their essays can help them focus and reflect on the critical discourse structure of the essays.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In addition, the ability for the application to indicate to the student that a discourse element could not be located, perhaps due to the 'lack of clarity' of this element, could also be helpful. Assuming that such a capability was reliable, this would force the writer to think about the clarity of an intended discourse element, such as a thesis statement.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Using a relatively small corpus of essay data where thesis statements have been manually annotated, we built a Bayesian classifier using the following features: sentence position; words commonly used in thesis statements; and discourse features, based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parses (Mann and Thompson, 1988 and Marcu, 2000). Our results indicate that this classification technique may be used toward automatic identification of thesis statements in essays. Furthermore, we show that this method generalizes across essay topics.</Paragraph>
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