Automatic Essay Scoring: Design and Implementation of Automatic Amharic Essay Scoring System Using Latent Semantic Analysis

Essay Assessment is considered to play a central role in educational process as essays are the most useful tool to assess learning outcomes. Consequently, essays have been incorporated into many of the standard testing programs like SAT (Systematic Aptitude Test), GRE (Graduate Record Examination), TOFEL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and GMAT (General Management Aptitude Test). Though the importance of essay assessment is elevated, the process of assessment using human evaluators is more of extremely labor intensive, time consuming and subjectivity. Hence, automatic essay scoring systems are developed to overcome all these problems in manual essay assessment. Currently, a number of automatic essay scoring systems using different techniques are available commercially or as a result of research in the field. However, most automatic essay scoring systems address English language. Therefore, this study is an attempt to develop similar systems for Amharic language which is the official language of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.