Using collocational features to improve automated scoring of EFL texts
Yves Bestgen · 2016
This study aims at determining whether collocational features automatically extracted from EFL (English as a foreign language) texts are useful for quality scoring, and allow the improvement of a competitive baseline based on, amongst other factors, bigram frequencies.The collocational features were gathered by assigning to each bigram in an EFL text eight association scores computed on the basis of a native reference corpus.The distribution of the association scores were then summarized by a few global statistical features and by a discretizing procedure.An experiment conducted on a publicly available dataset confirmed the effectiveness of these features and the benefit brought by using several discretized association scores.