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<Paper uid="P00-1052">
  <Title>The Role of Centering Theory's Rough-Shift in the Teaching and Evaluation of Writing Skills</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="2" end_page="2" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 The e-rater essay scoring system
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> One goal of automatic essay scoring systems suchase-rater is to represent the criteria that human experts use to evaluate essays. The writing features that e-rater evaluates were speci#0Ccally chosen to re#0Dect scoring criteria fortheessayportion ofthe GraduateManagement Admissions Test #28GMAT#29. These criteria are articulated in GMAT test preparation materials at http:#2F#2Fwww.gmat.org. In e-rater, syntactic variety is represented by features that quantify occurrences of clause types. Logical organization and clear transitions are represented by features that quantify cue words in certain syntactic constructions. The existence of main and supporting points is represented by features that detect where new points begin and where they are developed. E-rater also includes features that quantify the appropriateness of the vocabulary content of an essay.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One feature of writing valued by writing experts that is not explicitly represented in the currentversion of e-rater is local coherence. Centering Theory provides an algorithm for computing local coherence in written discourse. Our study investigates the applicability of Centering Theory's local coherence measure toessayevaluation by determining the e#0Bect of adding this new feature to e-rater's existing array of features.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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