The role of centering theory's rough-shift in the teaching and evaluation of writing skills

Authors:
Eleni Miltsakaki;Karen Kukich
Affiliations:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;Educatinal Testing Service, Princeton, NJ
Venue:
ACL '00 Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Year:
2000

Citing 10
Cited 8

Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse

Computational Linguistics
Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse

Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse
Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text

Computational Linguistics
Discourse segmentation by human and automated means

Computational Linguistics
Automated scoring using a hybrid feature identification technique

COLING '98 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
A centering approach to pronouns

ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse

ACL '83 Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Text segmentation based on similarity between words

ACL '93 Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text

ACL '94 Proceedings of the 32nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
An automatic method of finding topic boundaries

ACL '94 Proceedings of the 32nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

Toward an aposynthesis of topic continuity and intrasentential anaphora

Computational Linguistics
Automated rating of ESL essays

HLT-NAACL-EDUC '03 Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 03 workshop on Building educational applications using natural language processing - Volume 2
Modeling local coherence: an entity-based approach

ACL '05 Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Modeling local coherence: An entity-based approach

Computational Linguistics
Revisiting readability: a unified framework for predicting text quality

EMNLP '08 Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Probabilistic approaches for modeling text structure and their application to text-to-text generation

Empirical methods in natural language generation
Discourse constraints for document compression

Computational Linguistics
Detecting breakdowns in local coherence in the writing of Chinese English learners

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Existing software systems for automated essay scoring can provide NLP researchers with opportunities to test certain theoretical hypotheses, including some derived from Centering Theory. In this study we employ ETS's e-rater essay scoring system to examine whether local discourse coherence, as defined by a measure of Rough-Shift transitions, might be a significant contributor to the evaluation of essays. Our positive results indicate that Rough-Shifts do indeed capture a source of incoherence, one that has not been closely examined in the Centering literature. These results not only justify Rough-Shifts as a valid transition type, but they also support the original formulation of Centering as a measure of discourse continuity even in pronominal-free text.