Abstract: The present invention uses an algorithm which evaluates learners' short free-text answers when the answer has as few as 10 words. The answer key uses only one correct answer, allowing instructors to ask learners to produce short open-ended text responses to questions. The algorithm automates the scoring of free-text answers, enabling instructors to embed such questions in online courses, and providing nearly immediate scoring and feedback on learners' responses. The algorithm is based on the semantic relatedness of the words in the learners' answer to the single correct answer. The semantic relatedness algorithm requires a dedicated domain specific index or collection of topic-focused documents (a corpus), which is created by an automated crawl mechanism that collects documents based upon descriptive domain keywords.

Abstract: The present invention uses an algorithm which evaluates learners' short free-text answers when the answer has as few as 10 words. The answer key uses only one correct answer, allowing instructors to ask learners to produce short open-ended text responses to questions. The algorithm automates the scoring of free-text answers, enabling instructors to embed such questions in online courses, and providing nearly immediate scoring and feedback on learners' responses. The algorithm is based on the semantic relatedness of the words in the learners' answer to the single correct answer. The semantic relatedness algorithm requires a dedicated domain specific index or collection of topic-focused documents (a corpus), which is created by an automated crawl mechanism that collects documents based upon descriptive domain keywords.