• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.12
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• pp.1522-1534
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• 2015

This work presents a new method that can predict, without the use of training data, whether an input essay is written on a given topic. ConceptNet is a common-sense knowledge base that is generated automatically from sentences that are extracted from a variety of document types. An essay prompt is the topic that an essay should be written about. The method that is proposed in this paper uses ConceptNet and an essay prompt to decide whether or not an input essay is off-topic. We introduce a way to find the shortest path between two nodes on ConceptNet, as well as a way to calculate the semantic similarity between two nodes. Not only an essay prompt but also a student's essay can be represented by concept nodes in ConceptNet. The semantic similarity between the concepts that represent an essay prompt and the other concepts that represent a student's essay can be used for a calculation to rank "on-topicness" ; if a low ranking is derived, an essay is regarded as off-topic. We used eight different essay prompts and a student-essay collection for the performance evaluation, whereby our proposed method shows a performance that is better than those of the previous studies. As ConceptNet enables the conduction of a simple text inference, our new method looks very promising with respect to the design of an essay prompt for which a simple inference is required.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.9
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• pp.381-388
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• 2014

In this paper, we deal with implementation issues of an unknown word classifier for middle-school level English writing test. We define the type of unknown words occurred in English text and discuss the detection process for unknown words. Also, we define the type of swear words occurred in students's English writings, and suggest how to handle this type of words. We implement an unknown word classifier with a swear detection module for developing an automatic English writing scoring system. By experiments with actual test data, we evaluate the accuracy of the unknown word classifier as well as the swear detection module.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.66-77
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• 2001

The contents and results of teaching should be evaluated periodically and intermationally in the age of globalization. The Third Internatinal Geography Competition, held from August 13 to August 19,2000 in Seoul, was a good opportunity to compare the level of achievement in geography among Korean students with that of other countries. Students from 13 countries competed with one another by demonstrating their geographical knowledge via three kinds of test. The aim of this study is to evaluate the international level of high school students in geography education in light of the result of the competiton. Four specific contents ate analysed here: 1)the process and result of the competiton, 2) the analysis of test scores of all students, 3) the international comparison of achievement level of the Korean students, and 4)the evaluation of the examination items and their comparison with those of the first competition. The result of this study will help to evaluate ths competitive achievement of geography education in high school. Although the Korean studenrs scored high marks overall, their were relafively weak in the fieldwork assignment. This shows that instructions in geography are unbalanced.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.3 s.113
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• pp.223-230
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• 2007

The purpose of developing an automated scoring system for English composition is to score the tests for writing English sentences and to give feedback on them without human's efforts. This paper presents an automated system to score English composition, whose input is a single sentence, not an essay. Dealing with a single sentence as an input has some advantages on comparing the input with the given answers by human teachers and giving detailed feedback to the test takers. The system has been developed and tested with the real test data collected through English tests given to the third grade students in junior high school. Two steps of the process are required to score a single sentence. The first process is analyzing the input sentence in order to detect possible errors, such as spelling errors, syntactic errors and so on. The second process is comparing the input sentence with the given answer to identify the differences as errors. The results produced by the system were then compared with those provided by human raters.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.121-128
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• 2024

With the recent rise in the use of AI-based online translation tools, interest in their methods and effects on education has grown. This study involved 30 prospective elementary school teachers who completed an English writing task using an AI-based online translation tool. The study focused on assessing the impact of these tools on English writing skills and their practical applications. It examined the usability, educational value, and the advantages and disadvantages of the AI translation tool. Through data collected via writing tests, surveys, and interviews, the study revealed that the use of translation tools positively affects English writing skills. From the learners' perspective, these tools were perceived to provide support and convenience for learning. However, there was also recognition of the need for educational strategies to effectively use these tools, alongside concerns about methods to enhance the completeness or accuracy of translations and the potential for over-reliance on the tools. The study concluded that for effective utilization of translation tools, the implementation of educational strategies and the role of the teacher are crucial.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.37
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• pp.335-360
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether high-level(level 6) essay-writing questions in Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) have been presented appropriately so as to enable foreign test-takers to display their Korean writing ability properly, and to provide some suggestions on how those questions need to be changed. To accomplish this purpose, all the essay-writing questions were collected from the 33 TOPIK tests, from the 2nd in 1998 to the 35thin 2014, and analyzed from the perspectives of their topics and formats. The results are that high-level TOPIK essay-writing questions showed a strong tendency to take as their topics Korean sociocultural structures and phenomena, or current issues in Korea, and that they frequently employed guided writing formats by providing preset ideas or/and contexts for test-takers to write in a guided way; such tendencies were analyzed to shed a negative influence on test-takers displaying their writing ability and creativity, because those topics and preset ideas or contexts provided do not allow them to express their own opinions or positions freely. It is suggested that TOPIK essay-writing questions should be changed to deal with objective and general topics which enable test-takers to write freely and logically in Korean based on their experience, because TOPIK is not a test to check whether they have enough background knowledge about the Korean society and culture, but a test to assess their Korean proficiency.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.699-719
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• 2016

Alternate pictures that are proven to be equivalent are in high demand to assess creative thinking and language skills. This study aimed to investigate the equivalence of three pictures ('Dog owners,' 'Lost Dog,' and 'Overslept') recently developed for use in a creative writing task. Middle school students (N=183) wrote a story in English based on one of the three prompts distributed randomly. Four writing features (fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and temporality) were analyzed with Coh-Metrix and MANCOVA. The three prompts were largely equivalent in their capacity to detect differences among writers in all the features of writing. The difficulty levels of the three prompts, however, were not necessarily the same. Two prompts, Dog Owners and Lost Dog, were verified as equivalent prompts, and therefore, they are recommended as alternate forms to assess creative language skills in repeated measurements. The Overslept prompt had greater facility in eliciting diverse words and more temporal connectives in composing stories. The differential difficulty shown among the prompts suggests that the validity of using different picture versions in repeated assessment remains questionable unless those versions undergo equivalence verification.