Towards On-line Automated Semantic Scoring of English-Chinese Translation

Described and exemplified a semantic scoring system of students' on-line English-Chinese translation. To achieve accurate assessment, the system adopted a comprehensive method which combines semantic scoring with keyword matching scoring. Four kinds of words-verbs, adjectives, adverbs and "the rest" including nouns, pronouns, idioms, prepositions, etc., are identified after parsing. The system treats different words tagged with different part of speech differently. Then it calculated the semantic similarity between these words of the standard versions and those of students' translations by the distinctive differences of the semantic features of these words with the aid of HowNet. The first semantic feature of verbs and the last semantic features of adjectives and adverbs are calculated. "The rest" is scored by keyword matching. The experiment results show that the semantic scoring system is applicable in fulfilling the task of scoring students' on-line English-Chinese translations.