The paper “Automated Grading Of Short Text Answers: Preliminary Results In A Course Of Health Informatics” has been accepted for presentation at the 18th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL2019). This work is a joint effort between our group and University of L’Aquila, and is authored by Giovanni De Gasperis, Stefano Menini, Sara Tonelli and Pierpaolo Vittorini.

Abstract:

Students learning Health Informatics in the degree course of Medicine and Surgery of the University of L’Aquila (Italy) are required – to pass the exam – to submit solutions to assignments concerning the execution and interpretation of statistical analyses. The paper presents a tool for the automated grading of such a kind of solutions, where the statistical analyses are made up R commands and outputs, and the interpretations are short text answers. The tool performs a static analysis of the R commands with the respective output, and uses Natural Language Processing techniques for the short text answers. The paper summarises the solution regarding the R commands and output, and delves into the method and the results used for the automated classification of the short text answers.