Is getting the right answer just about choosing the right words? The   role of syntactically-informed features in short answer scoring
  Developments in the educational landscape have spurred greater interest in the problem of automatically scoring short answer questions. A recent shared task on this topic revealed a fundamental divide in the modeling approaches that have been applied to this problem, with the best-performing systems split between those that employ a knowledge engineering approach and those that almost solely leverage lexical information (as opposed to higher-level syntactic information) in assigning a score to a given response. This paper aims to introduce the NLP community to the largest corpus currently available for short-answer scoring, provide an overview of methods used in the shared task using this data, and explore the extent to which more syntactically-informed features can contribute to the short answer scoring task in a way that avoids the question-specific manual effort of the knowledge engineering approach. 
Derrick Higgins, Chris Brew, Michael Heilman, Ramon Ziai, Lei Chen,   Aoife Cahill, Michael Flor, Nitin Madnani, Joel Tetrea...
cs.CL