Web app for quick evaluation of subjective answers using natural language processing

Abstract

In current digital climate, education sector is evolving as the computer technology advances. Education is being digitized: online classes, online examination methods are conducted, etc. During examination, students are assessed by their answers having given for the question set by a teacher. Today many tools are available to assess the performance of a student using multi choice questions tools which provide instant evaluation, but there are available very limited and operational tools where subjective type answer of students are evaluated. This paper presents a web-based application to address this challenge. It automates the process of subjective answers checking and generates results through using natural language processing methods, like keyword matching semantic, lexical analysis and cosine similarity. Experiments show that appreciated by the teacher result and the system estimation does not have much difference which signifies that the system evaluates answers with a 97 % accuracy. The presented system not only reduces manpower but also eliminates the traditional method of conducting exclusively subjective exams using paper documents. It also eliminates the delays in the paper checking, result generation process. The cases of information leak are being reduced and the objectivity of the assessment is being increased.

Keywords

• cosine similarity
• information extraction
• keyword matching
• natural language processing