[infomap-nlp-users] document x document

[Mich <pse...@zo...>]

Greetings all,

First of all, let me express my gratitude about your work, that is
infomap-nlp and the fact that you let others use it. One of them being
me, who, in search of alternatives to various 'automatic essay grading
software' stumbled upon LSA and ultimately Infomap-nlp. It took me a
couple of days to get this all running in a windows environment (using
cygwin), which to you may be an indication of how much i really know
about GNU, Unix, etc -- nada.
Anyway, despite the setbacks, i've worked my way through the manual,
built a few models, and are able to use both the associate word and
associate document commands. My question, however, concerns if it
would be possible to document to document comparisons. Could somebody
here provide me with info on this?

If you are interested in knowing why i would want to do this, please
read on. I am currently working for the department of
education-studies, at the University of Leiden (Netherlands). As said,
we would be interested in 'automatic grading', what teacher wouldn't?
Of course, it's not as simple as some companies have suggested, or at
least, i doubt it would be. However, experimenting with freely
available software under the GNU license won't do harm. On that basis,
we have actually three goals:
- automatic grading, which would ideally give something like a grade.
However, using infomap-nlp it would, theoretically possible, to
compare students' essays to a corpus of relevant information, thus
giving at least some indication of how 'well' they performed. Also,
much like in psychology, pedagogics/education suffers from a lack of
justifiable scales, so, comparisons such as this might also be good -
in the sense that they would be objective - indicators of cognitive ability.
- diminishing plagiarism, which would be possible if i could compare
each student's essay to a corpus of their peers
- retrieving information about the student, from what they write. You
could imagine that the similarity between an essay and various
emotional-coloured corpura (such as poetry) would make it possible to
develop additional 'emotional scales'.

I hope you find it worthwhile to help me in these three quests.

Cheers,

Mich