ThesisWorkshopper: An Automated Thesis Statement Evaluator

Abstract

● Identification of Innovation: While scholars in rhetoric and composition are showing increasing interest in using large corpora of student writing to analyze student essays and instructor feedback on them, they have largely avoided developing natural language processing technologies designed to provide rich feedback to students on their writing. At the same time, those involved with the development of automated essay evaluation (AEE) systems—who are, almost always, not compositionists—are increasingly developing systems that provide rich feedback on a variety of essay features, rather than simple scores. The current study aims to show an example of how a web-based natural language processing tool can provide students with rich feedback on their papers under a process pedagogy framework.