Automatic Arabic Short Answers Scoring Using Longest Common Subsequence and Arabic WordNet

The manual process of scoring short answers of Arabic essay questions is exhaustive, susceptible to error and consumes instructor's time and resources. This paper explores longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm as a string-based text similarity measure for effectively scoring short answers of Arabic essay questions. To achieve this effectiveness, the longest common subsequence is modified by developing weight-based measurement techniques and implemented along with using Arabic WordNet for scoring Arabic short answers. The experiments conducted on a dataset of 330 students' answers reported Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value of 0.81 and Pearson correlation r value of 0.94. Findings based on experiments have shown improvements in the accuracy of performance of the proposed approach compared to similar studies. Moreover, the statistical analysis has shown that the proposed method scores students' answers similar to that of human estimator.