An automated scoring approach for Arabic short answers essay questions

Evaluating and scoring essay questions is an exhausting, time consuming process and require a lot of effort. So, applying automated tools is essentially required to tackle these drawbacks. In this study, we propose an automated scoring approach for short answers to Arabic essay questions. The scoring process is based on the similarity between the student's answer and model answer, cosine similarity measure is used for this purpose. Cosine similarity is a heuristic evolutionary measure that has succeeded to solve text to text similarity problems. Word root and synonyms for each keyword in the student's answer and the model answer are used in order to achieve accurate results. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach achieved competitive scores in comparison with other approaches.