Automated language essay scoring systems: a literature review

AES models have been found to utilize a broad range of manually-tuned shallow and deep linguistic features. AES systems have many strengths in reducing labor-intensive marking activities, ensuring a consistent application of scoring criteria, and ensuring the objectivity of scoring. Although many techniques have been implemented to improve the AES systems, three primary challenges have been identified. The challenges are lacking of the sense of the rater as a person, the potential that the systems can be deceived into giving a lower or higher score to an essay than it deserves, and the limited ability to assess the creativity of the ideas and propositions and evaluate their practicality. Many techniques have only been used to address the first two challenges.