Effective Structure Matching Algorithm for Automatic Assessment of Use-Case Diagram

The demand for higher education keeps on increasing. The invention of information technology and e-learning have, to a large extent, solved the problem of shortage of skilled and qualified teachers. But there is no guarantee that this will ensure the high quality of learning. In spite of large number of students, though the delivery of learning materials and tests to the students have become very easy by uploading the same on the web, assessment could be tedious. There is a need to develop tools and technologies for fully automated assessment. In this paper, an innovative algorithm has been proposed for matching structures of two use-case diagrams drawn by a student and an expert respectively for automatic assessment of the same. Zhang and Shasha's tree edit distance algorithm has been extended for assessing use-case diagrams. Results from 445 students' answers based on 14 different scenarios are analyzed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. No comparable study has been reported by any other diagram assessing algorithms in the research literature.