Automate Essay Scoring Using Machine Learning and NLP

Manually evaluating essays is time-consuming, subjective, and labor-intensive for educators. Different raters may score the same essay differently due to personal biases. An automatic essay scoring (AES) system provides consistent, fast, and objective evaluation of writing skills. By analyzing grammar, vocabulary, coherence, structure, and content, machine learning models can score essays accurately and provide actionable feedback to learners.

Using natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, essays can be tokenized, analyzed for linguistic features, and evaluated using regression models. Features like grammar errors, sentence complexity, cohesion, vocabulary richness, and topic relevance are extracted. ML models predict essay scores by learning from human-graded samples, ensuring reliable, explainable, and scalable grading systems for educational platforms and institutions.

Essays are input as text, and NLP pipelines preprocess them by tokenizing, removing stopwords, and extracting linguistic features. Models analyze writing quality based on coherence, grammar, sentence variation, lexical diversity, and semantic relevance. Regression or ranking models trained on human-graded datasets predict essay scores. Feedback modules can suggest writing improvements based on grammar errors, vocabulary gaps, or coherence issues detected during analysis.

• Collect a large dataset of student essays along with corresponding human-assigned scores for model training and evaluation.
• Preprocess essays with NLP techniques: tokenization, POS tagging, dependency parsing, and error detection.
• Extract features like grammar accuracy, sentence complexity, semantic relevance to prompts, and vocabulary richness scores.
• Train regression models (Linear Regression, XGBoost, LightGBM) or ranking models (RankNet) to predict essay scores.
• Deploy a web app where students submit essays and instantly receive scores along with personalized feedback and improvement suggestions.

• ASAP Automated Essay Scoring Dataset
• Automated Essay Scoring with NLP Techniques
• TextBlob and LanguageTool for Grammar Checking