The persuasive essays for rating, selecting, and understanding argumentative and discourse elements (PERSUADE) corpus...

Area of Science:

• Natural Language Processing
• Computational Linguistics
• Educational Technology

Background:

• Automatic writing evaluation systems often overlook semantic and organizational aspects of student writing.
• Developing robust algorithms for analyzing discourse elements in argumentative text is crucial for improving feedback.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the Persuasive Essays for Rating, Selecting, and Understanding Argumentative and Discourse Elements (PERSUADE) corpus.
• Facilitate the creation of novel, open-source scoring algorithms for discourse analysis.
• Enhance automatic writing evaluation systems by incorporating semantic and organizational features.

Main Methods:

• The study introduces a large-scale corpus of persuasive essays.
• The corpus is annotated with discourse elements.
• This resource is designed to support the development of new algorithms.

Main Results:

• The PERSUADE corpus provides a valuable resource for NLP research.
• It enables the study of discourse elements in argumentative writing.
• The corpus supports the development of advanced writing evaluation tools.

Conclusions:

• The PERSUADE corpus is a significant contribution to the field of automatic writing evaluation.
• It will accelerate research into discourse analysis and semantic understanding in student writing.
• This resource opens new possibilities for developing more nuanced writing assessment technologies.